Overview
This is a fictional account of the United Nations Expedition to Alpha Centauri featured in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a 1999 computer game.

I am presenting material in the form of a photo essay.

Introduction
This is the story of an expedition into the unknown. It was an act of desperation, undertaken not in optimism or from a place of pride, but because our species, and the civilization it created, had run out of time. And so we fled the world we had seemingly destroyed for one that might yet destroy us.


Sid Meier, et al. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Firaxis Games. 1999.

Source Material
The primary source for this story and the associated timeline is, quite naturally, the eponymous computer game and its 1999 sequel, Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire, for which Brian Reynolds and Tim Train were the was lead designers, respectively. You will see additional traces and head nods to the late Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park; the late James Clavell, author of the The Asian Saga, the most famous installment of which was probably Shōgun; author David Brinn, who penned The Postman in 1985; the present-day TNT television series The Last Ship; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and its sequel; the short-lived 2009 NBC television series Kings; the book Cold War Hot, edited by Peter G. Tsouras; Jon F. Zeigler's GURPS Alpha Centauri RPG book; the 1998 Blizzard computer game StarCraft and its many derivative and companion works; the Fallout series of computer games (by both Bethesda and Obsidian); Christopher Nolen's 2010 movie Inception; and many others.

The Tribe faction, along with the characters of "Pete" Landers and John Baptist Keller (here, Jean-Baptiste Keller) are the original creations of an individual with the screen name "Thorn" on another forum. The Shapers of Chiron faction is the original creation of an individual name "Iron Talon." Both were former participants of the defunct online community called The Frontier, which closed its doors in 2017.

Visit Our Sister Datalinks!
This story has been in various stages of the telling for some time. Here's a link to the photologue since March 2022. Some of the information presented in each location will be different.

Join the Planetary Network!
The Discord community for this fiction can be found here.

Contribute to the Ongoing Story!
Feel free to contribute your own ideas. This is an exercise in worldbuilding, mostly. Letting the imagination soar.

Two ways to engage. First, peruse our GoogleDoc . You can review flavor quotations, the much-expanded tech tree, citizen types, and faction analytics. Second, post your questions and ideas to the thread below.

Great question! The short answer is, quite a few. The long answer is below. The meta-narrative answer is, as many as needed.

The original seven factions made it on-world. That's Gaia's Stepdaughters (Deirdre); the University of Planet (Zakharov); the Human Labyrinth, also known as the Hive (Yang); the Dynamic Enterprise, also known as Morgan Industries (Morgan); the Peacekeeping Forces (Lal); the Spartan Federation (Santiago); and the Lord's Conclave, also known as the Believers (Godwinson). So did the Cybernetic Consciousness (Aki Zeta-5), introduced by Strategos' Risk.

On the AlphaCentauri2 forums, the parallel version of this photoessay includes references to the Nautilus Pirates (Svensgaard) and the Data Angels (Roze). Assume the Cult of Planet (Domai) and the Free Drones (Dawn) also spawn at some point down the line. I'm not partial to depictions of aliens in sci-fi, so even though "my" Chiron has artifacts attesting to the existence of a non-Earth intelligence, the Caretakers and Usurpers are out.

There are, of course, a number of new factions. The Human Tribe (Landers); the Dreamers of Chiron (Cobb/Cohen); the Human Ascendancy (Pahlavi); the Hunters of Chiron (Marsh); the Children of the Atom (Anhaldt); the New State, sometimes called Those Beneath (André-St. Germaine); the New Two Thousand, also known as the Pilgrims (van de Graaf); the Memory of Earth (Mercator); the Shapers of Chiron (Nagao); and the Tomorrow Institute (Metrion).

Strategos' Risk introduced the concept of the SMACER, too. They're a great addition to this setting, so I won't spoil them. Perhaps, if we're lucky, he'll cross-post for us over the holiday season!

I don't think I've yet introduced the Memory, the Hunters, or the Institute in this retelling, although they're coming. I can do Marsh as today's update before going back to settlement updates and other inspirations.

Before signing off, I'm thrilled you're following the story and even more excited that you're engaging with questions and requests. It certainly keeps me motivated. What else are you curious about? Have you any ideas for factions?

Building factions is hard work. I think Reynolds did a tremendous job with the original seven. I had a chance to ask him a question once over in the comments section of the Paean to SMAC blog. I was interested to know whether any faction ideas ended up on the cutting room floor. As an impressionable teenager interested in history back in 1999, I always felt SMAC did a near-perfect job of capturing the prevailing social currents and questions of the time. An incredibly perceptive work of futurism.

I try to follow certain guardrails for faction design. They all have to answer three questions. What is the fundamental truth of the universe? Why did civilization on Earth fail? What is needed for humanity to survive as a species on Chiron? The factions should also be about big ideas, and their leader, like those in the original game, should be capable of intellectualizing, and have enough self-awareness and general knowledge to speak knowledgeably and even empathetically about the other societies on Planet. (Strategos' Risk coined the term societies as a synonym for factions.)

To whit, the Memory of Earth is a faction of mostly defense and intelligence professionals, scarred by the Cold War, who want to unity the Unity survivors to stave off a feared alien invasion. The Tomorrow Institute, sometimes called the Tomorrow Initiative, was formed by archivists and computer scientists who want to recover the ship's central data core and make its contents available to everyone on Planet. In my fiction, the Peacekeepers are more about bureaucracy and democracy, and so the Tomorrow Institute encroaches a bit on their information focus. The Tomorrow Institute, like the Shapers, is about memory. The Hunters of Chiron are basically Mad Maxers.

I’ll get us started.

I am always curious which of the new factions are most intriguing to readers.

Probably the proudest I’ve ever been was when somebody remarked that reading Pahlavi’s quote comparing the human race to a bonsai plant made them viscerally angry.

I hope to explore further Cobb’s relationship with his father, Ian Dunross, as well as Van de Graaf’s history with various other leaders, including Morgan, Cohen, Pahlavi, and Anhaldt.

At one point in my notes, the Tomorrow Institute was the Tomorrow Initiative, led by Jomai van Tromp, a Dutch-Indonesian with a taste for politics. She was an obsessive balancer, adjusting her own faction’s alliances in order to perpetuate a kind of power equilibrium between the other factions, hoping to stave off general war. Kind of a polar opposite to Mercator, who wants to build a grand alliance, first in opposition to alleged aliens, but perhaps eventually in opposition to follow-on forces from Earth.

Desert Journeyman said:

At one point in my notes, the Tomorrow Institute was the Tomorrow Initiative, led by Jomai van Tromp, a Dutch-Indonesian with a taste for politics. She was an obsessive balancer, adjusting her own faction’s alliances in order to perpetuate a kind of power equilibrium between the other factions, hoping to stave off general war. Kind of a polar opposite to Mercator, who wants to build a grand alliance, first in opposition to alleged aliens, but perhaps eventually in opposition to follow-on forces from Earth.

This setting has such a proliferation of factions and sufficiently developed societal complexity to support such parasitic/manipulator factions that exist solely to alter other factions. Such factions could not really exist alone, because their ideology is reliant on the existence of others to play off of. Perhaps the Data Angels are a canonical example, since while such a civilization might have plenty of internal hacking, probe actions only make sense when applied externally.

As far as a balancer faction goes, it does have a distinctive ideology, but it says nothing about what it would look like internally. What is the lifestyle of such a faction? Is every citizen trained to be a diplomat, or to be a spy? What culture or art would such a faction produce? etc. So further elaboration would be necessary. At least with Mercator, there is a wealth of ufologist and intelligence agency imagery to draw off of. Their goal might be to unify humanity, but their aesthetic is X-COM and so that is what gives them character, not an abstract political science concept.

Banes seems like an adult in the room as any, interesting to see how he would seek to subvert Cobb’s rule, and what his relation with Cohen is like. That said, I would hope that he actually has an ideological component to him- all of the splinter factions in SMAX have a distinguishing ideology to them. Would be rather mundane if all he stands for is “not allowing Struan’s on Planet to ruin.” Perhaps his Mara’Toan mercenaries will link up with their disgruntled Sabre equivalents and pull a Mamluk Egypt, overthrowing their employers. The non-dreamers will run the asylum.

Inspired by Strategos' Risk, let's talk about the ideologies of the different factions that comprise this telling of the SMAC story.

As I've explained previously, each faction leader propounds a philosophy answering three basic questions about life, the universe, and everything:

1. What is the fundamental truth of the universe?
2. Why did civilization on Earth fail?
3. What is necessary to ensure the survival of the human species on Chiron?

The original factions collectively reflect the peculiar zeitgeist of the 1990s, while their user-generated counterparts are more likely to tap into popular anxieties of the 1980s or 2000s. And I think it was blogger Nick Stipanovich who observed that every single one of them is an intellectual.

Factions are like water. When there are only seven on the narrative canvas, they spread until they have covered all conceivable intellectual ground. We know Zakharov will have something to say whenever science is in play. Deirdre would logically give the ecologist's perspective, & etc. Adding additional factions limits the unique intellectual space that the existing factions can stake out as their own.

So what do I want to say today?

Writing these factions is, of course, a challenge. Every faction leader has two dimensions. They articulate a specific ideology, and they are also individuals with their own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, these clash. And often, we aren't even sure what those factions stand for, exactly. Most people would probably associate Morgan with free market capitalism, and they'd be correct that he is the "economics guy" most likely to engage with political economy theory day-to-day, but the lore tells us clearly that he is actually a monopolist. Zakharov should have the most to say about the potential pitfalls of bias, but if I remember correctly, the lore puts him forth as an unapologetic misogynist, and certainly a massive jerk.

Here are my thoughts about the different faction leaders presented in this story. I invite you to grapple alongside me with these depictions.

Gaia's Stepdaughters
Lady Deirdre Skye is all about the idea that a feedback loop exists between the survivors and Planet. Her faction is the most likely to tread softly when it comes to living with the land. I expect the Stepdaughters will also be leaders of the pack when it comes to identifying the different ways in which Chironian organisms can benefit humans, if only because they will spend less energy on things like Terran pseudoculture, a Gaian loanword I'll use to describe attempts to grow Terran crops in Chironian soil (and now an early Unity Tech). Deirdre is avoidant, and her faction has become reclusive because of it. She is also potentially vulnerable to charges of misandry. Deirdre believes that the patriarchy poisoned the Earth and that its legacy must be comprehensively dismantled on Planet in order to save both humanity and its new home world from destruction.

The University of Planet
Academician Prokhor Zakharov stands for the use of tools. In his view, our species had already devised appropriate solutions to famine, disease, and climatological crisis. The problem, in his view, was scrupulous deference to fear of the unknown. To Zakharov, the sublimest act is to catalogue. He means to learn Planet empirically. Zakharov's chief character trait is hubris. The problem we have is that Zakharov steps all over the toes of the other "science" factions, the Human Ascendancy and the Children of the Atom, although I suppose the University's social organization is distinct to them. His faction really has two faces. The students are rowdy with youth and undigested discovery, his "establishment" preoccupied with being the "adults" in the room.

The Dynamic Enterprise (a.k.a. Morgan Industries)
CEO Nwabudike Morgan believes that wealth is the pathway to power. We didn't kill the Earth, we merely used it, just as we will use Chiron. There isn't anything to change. I think this actually works better when we're sitting at the "End of History" and there's a McDonalds at the end of every block, a Lexus in every driveway. That is to say, a lot's changed since 1999. But the idea that "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" is still intriguing. Morgan's people are nostalgic and pleasure-seeking and (one assumes) as unfreighted by worries about the future as he can make them, just like Americans were back in 1999, but I think Morgan himself is motivated principally by a determination never again to be cold, hungry, or at the mercy of others. Morgan, to me, is the kind of person who insists on capitalism because it is a game he has never lost. As soon as a competitor emerges, Morgan abandons all principle. Morgan gives us a lot of space, I think, to explore the life of the common laborer on Planet. If this were a Western, he would be our railroad--a kingdom as much as a corporation, with all sorts of downstream implications that, for Morgan, are utterly secondary to the question of whether he is being made rich in the offing. The lore says that money is just one of the currencies in which he deals, so he is certainly no stranger to politics. I think it is best, though, if his default solutions to any problem are fairly predictable: buyouts, bribery, rule-making, and contract thuggery. Morganite bases by definition must be emporiums of delight--tantalizing to the senses and fatal to conventional notions of morality. In my view, Morgan's quotations suggest a flippant man convinced he has something useful to bequeath the rest of us--closer in spirit to Elon Musk than, say, just-ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek, the epitome of an unhappy warrior. Together, Morgan and Zakharov are our Icari, flying too close to the sun in their pride. Morgan's impishness honestly makes it hard for me to see why I'd want to trust him with my company. The man seems like he can't resist giving the dragon's tail a good yank--hardly the kind of sobriety we presumably seek from our money men. He actually fits much better the archetype of an Iron Man (or, as I've already said, a Musk)--the visionary who is tolerated because his genius is unsurpassed. But what genius, exactly, is that? Apple founder Steve Jobs at least seemed to have some path-breaking insights about how people wanted to interact with technology and how it should be marketed to them. His "genius" arose from his insight that you could create demand by planting new ideas in people's heads. Walt Disney recognized that millions of people wanted to access nostalgia. If we may say anything about Musk, I supposed it would be that he has never seen a project he considers too big to tackle. I think we're supposed to conclude that Morgan's great contribution to the future is his recognition that energy can become the central element in all our lives, if only we can get enough synergy going between economics, science, and industry.

The Spartan Federation
Whenever I sit down to tell her story, I cannot help but think that Colonel Corazón Santiago got in over her head. She's the "army one," and it takes a well-educated reader to recognize that her faction might owe something to the right-wing radicalism of the early 1990s. My take on Santiago is that she thinks people simply lost the will to protect their rights. That's a big statement. What rights are we talking about? Under what circumstances would they need to be physically enforced? It's actually hard to imagine any of their fellow survivors marching up to a Spartan camp and trying to force them into an unequal treaty. (Vengeance is another matter.)

In my lore, Santiago never really gets her feet under her because she's at war straight out of the gate. We know every one of her people are soldiers who, if they wake up in-barracks, start the morning with calisthenics. We a lot of them believe that anyone who isn't carrying a gun is potential prey. For Spartans, if war is service, it is service primarily to the self. I haven't really done enough digging into the question of whether Santiago is going to make war all the time, and I know Strategos' Risk's reason for creating the Imperial Military Focus arose from his making that connection. There's a lot we don't really know about the Spartans. Does everyone have a military rank? Are they a hierarchical society that spends all day playing soldier, or just the most ornery people on Planet? I think Santiago is certainly trying to form an army camp, while many of her subjects are just gun enthusiasts who just know that's the shortest route to a meal ticket. In the original game, the Spartans' excellence at war leads to conquest, but I could see Santiago being a reasonably good neighbor if ever she got her own house in order. I think, for her, the idea is to be ready. She'll fight her corner, and will probably be pessimistic about the motivations of others (meaning she'd have a lower threshold to reach before authorizing preemptive violence), but I don't think she's looking for trouble to a greater extent than any other leader.

Santiago is clearly estranged from power structures. She wouldn't trust the Planetary Council as far as she could throw it, even if she were charting a more isolationist policy. Both she and her people are prone to conspiratorial thinking, too long divorced from power to have realistic understandings about how it is used, much less of the limitations inherent to all decision-making.

The Human Labyrinth (a.k.a. The Human Hive)
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang thinks some people are fit to rule, others to be led. And his conclusion is that, for the species to survive, the fit must force themselves upon the unfit. Yang would say that democracy just doesn't work: people aren't willing to do the hard things. (In this, he agrees with Zakharov, Santiago, Marsh, and St. Germaine.) To give him at least the courage of his supposed convictions, I have assumed that Yang actually insists that leaders demonstrate and hone their fitness over time. Yang is indifferent to morality, but I don't think he is profligate with lives. He is hard but not cruel. People are tools that make noises if squeezed too hard.

Yang of course has a clear flaw. We know from world history and probably individual experience: people who are scared and unhappy are not productive, creative, or manageable. I guess the way Yang gets around this is by insisting that he can't possibly manage in a way that meets everyone's need, so he treats his society like a system: he strives to get an average value from every part, replaces them as necessary, and stays within tolerances without getting caught up in the fruitless pursuit of optimums.

The Lord's Conclave (a.k.a The Lord's Believers)
Sister Miriam Godwinson believes that a turn away from righteousness destroyed the Earth. This is not quite the same thing as the abandonment of a particular faith tradition. While I have no doubt that Godwinson is comfortable asserting an explicit morality, my version would trace this morality back to self-evident Natural Law.

Just how Miriam interprets that Law is the rub. I'm given over to thinking she would actually cite history, not one specific religious text, to bolster her conclusions. This creates an obvious problem: to everyone but herself, Miriam is presenting as a prophet in the Old Testament style--a person who is literally speaking what they claim is the will of God.

Irrespective of whether Miriam's take is a popular one amongst people looking to dedicate themselves to service of the Lord, I think it would attract a very large number of followers who are merely "adjacent" to her belief structure.

In my view, organized religion can be a powerful force for good and for evil, and I think certain religious interpretations are actually popular with certain audiences because of the penalties they impose on designated out-groups.

St. Germaine also says a bit about God, and his vision is very much in the tradition of propping up the temporal powers that be, such as by vesting men with certain authorities over their households.

The Peacekeeping Forces
Commissioner Pravin Lal needs a lot of work. I think I need to reorient him from the "information freedoms" guy to the democracy guy. I think Lal must feel that despotism created circumstances incompatible with successful policy-making.

The Peacekeepers create a modern technocratic republic on Planet, and while Lal wrestles with what faction security means in that context, he believes honestly in transparency, self-determination, and respect for differences of opinion.

There are a lot of leaders in this particular telling of SMAC that also want to lead the weak. Let's examine how they differ.

• Yang, Santiago, and Marsh all believe that a lack of willingness to struggle essentially amounted to planetary suicide. For Yang, the root cause was an obsession with participatory self-government. Marsh and Santiago feel it was timidness of spirit.
• Like Yang, St. Germaine believes (most) people are incapable of self-rule, which is why both men practice a form of despotism. However, St. Germaine holds that people desire stern leadership. In St. Germaine's retelling of Earth's demise, the problem was selection of the wrong despot.
• Both Marsh and Santiago want to promote physical excellence, but Santiago sees war as the acme of human endeavor, while Marsh believes that sport must take a central place. Santiago insists that everyone must prepare for war, while Marsh comes closer to your high school coach venting his spleen on hapless intramuralists who would rather be playing a video game. The difference, if you will, between people with a "Come and take it" sticker on the rear bumper of their pickup truck and those who slap "All who wander are not lost" next to the National Park badges on the hatch of their Subaru. Santiago is much quicker to lash out when angry. Marsh is about the experience of the outdoors and testing the self against nature. Santiago is about putting on a uniform and fighting against long odds.
• "Joiner" Banes shares some of St. Germaine's skepticism with the forms of democratic government, but I think the former is actually closer to Miriam in that he comfortably substitutes his personal sense of right and wrong in place of any consensus document. St. Germaine thinks democracy needs guard rails. Banes just thinks it requires a little "offensive" help from time to time. St. Germaine wants to avoid sharing bad news; Banes wants to take action to ensure that the news is less bad. Cobb was fascinated by the idea that the course of human history could be changed by discovering the source of humanity's self-destructive impulse, but lacked the self-discipline to take his experiments very far. Banes is more interested in how the toolkit Cobb left behind can enable him to save humanity. To understand the problem that Banes represents, look at the central problem behind DC graphic novel Kingdom Come: do superheroes disempower normal people? Banes represents this idea of the self-appointed hero. So far, in past fiction, I have been putting forth Lal in that role. Lal has begun to suspect he might require some kind of oversight to legitimize what he thinks he must do. Banes doesn't bother. St. Germaine thinks men need a father figure; Banes thinks they need a guardian angel. For St. Germaine, playing his role is fun, and everyone must participate. Banes is perfectly content to manage from behind the scenes.

More than one society puts science front-and-center.

• I think the greatest distinction between Zakharov and Tamineh Pahlavi is that the ex-Soviet scientist is motivated by curiosity, and Pahlavi by fear. Pahlavi is trying to correct aspects of humanity that cause her distress--aging, infirmity, imperfection--by using science as a shield, while Zakharov is using it more like a chainsaw. In this, Zakharov is actually almost perfectly aligned with Aleigha Cohen, although in her case, the motivation is boundary manipulation for its own sake, not genuine curiosity.
• Anhaldt's central conceit is his lack of trust in human faculties, which is a much stronger instantiation of what drives Pahlavi. As a result, Anhaldt has convinced himself and others that their lives are better off in the hands of machines. Over time, this belief is reinforced by the use of those machines to organize information in counter-intuitive ways.

Several societies deal with the problem of information.

• Lal, Metrion, and Zakharov probably preside over the most open of the human societies on Planet. Lal is concerned that proper government can't be done in the dark. Zakharov, with a handful of exceptions for his most controversial research, essentially accepts that data must be shared to be properly mined for insights. Metrion is convinced that the legacy of Earth lies in the thought it has produced. (This sets him apart from Nagao, for whom Earth is mostly a specific location, or St. Germaine, for whom the past is comforting myth.)

Desert Journeyman said:

IHere are my thoughts about the different faction leaders presented in this story. I invite you to grapple alongside me with these depictions.

These descriptors seem uncontroversially sound.

Desert Journeyman said:

Gaia's Stepdaughters
Lady Deirdre Skye is all about the idea that a feedback loop exists between the survivors and Planet. Her faction is the most likely to tread softly when it comes to living with the land. I expect the Stepdaughters will also be leaders of the pack when it comes to identifying the different ways in which Chironian organisms can benefit humans, if only because they will spend less energy on things like Terran pseudoculture, a Gaian loanword I'll use to describe attempts to grow Terran crops in Chironian soil (and now an early Unity Tech). Deirdre is avoidant, and her faction has become reclusive because of it. She is also potentially vulnerable to charges of misandry. Deirdre believes that the patriarchy poisoned the Earth and that its legacy must be comprehensively dismantled on Planet in order to save both humanity and its new home world from destruction.

The Gaians being about a feedback loop with Planet is a good summary of Skye's approach. In some ways, the game's decision to allow Earth's flora to coexist with Planet's is a bit of an easy decision. Plants need nitrate, they seemingly don't madden Planetmind, so Earth forests spring everywhere. Perhaps this should have been a far more difficult decision- this is about introducing invasive species to crowd out a native ecosystem! A sentient super-lifeform is being colonized! I've never played it, but it sounds like the Civ IV Planetfall mod did add some neat innovations in that direction. (There's also the potential concept of Planetforming vs. Terraforming dual dueling research trees.) But that's just idle speculation for a future game. The base setting as is would have Deidre behind a Gaian Green Revolution, sure.

As far as the patriarchy goes, embracing the Earth Mother and New Age divine feminine concepts come as set dressing alongside mystic ecology, but there's nothing in the text that really stipulates it. It's something to be read into, sure. There's also that reference to her parents being divorced in her profile that one could possibly make hay out of, maybe her globe-trotting U.N. security consultant father was a philanderer.

Desert Journeyman said:

The University of Planet
Academician Prokhor Zakharov stands for the use of tools. In his view, our species had already devised appropriate solutions to famine, disease, and climatological crisis. The problem, in his view, was scrupulous deference to fear of the unknown. To Zakharov, the sublimest act is to catalogue. He means to learn Planet empirically. Zakharov's chief character trait is hubris. The problem we have is that Zakharov steps all over the toes of the other "science" factions, the Human Ascendancy and the Children of the Atom, although I suppose the University's social organization is distinct to them. His faction really has two faces. The students are rowdy with youth and undigested discovery, his "establishment" preoccupied with being the "adults" in the room.

Sure, being for tools and against the fear of the unknown works with him. I don't think he's simply about cataloging though. To observe is passive; he's also about building and innovating. Or maybe Zakharov's not? Maybe he's more pure science and discovery, over applied science and invention. Maybe he chooses science over engineering. Would gel with his hardcore theoretical physics persona. I don't know, I'd have to reread his quotes. As far as the other science factions go, their research is in the service of their own distinct utopian visions of how a society should be run, even if the Children of the Atom's is mildly incoherent. Are they for nuclear reactors or are they for A.I.? How are the two interlinked? How do they fit together? To some extent it's seconding ideological coherence to aesthetics, which is fine.

Desert Journeyman said:

The Dynamic Enterprise (a.k.a. Morgan Industries)
CEO Nwabudike Morgan believes that wealth is the pathway to power.

Much can be said about Morgan, but everyone knows him at some instinctual level. From the word "resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be", we get his deal. He's pure id, as far as acquiring and competing for stuff goes. Man loves to barter and that's all there is to it. In some sense, he is the purest individualist out of all of the faction leaders. That's to the credit of the writing, because Randian uber-capitalists are such individualists, so there the ideological aligns with the personal. Like the player, he just wants to win the game. That's all there is to it, and everything else is just post hoc.

As far as energy being central, that's true, but maybe that's one of those things the game elides over a bit. Yeah we know we need to build solar collectors, but unfortunately the setting never really describes how an energy economy truly works, not even in a vague sketch. Which is fine for the imagination but doesn't give us much to work with. Do other factions neglect energy generation until later on in their development? Doesn't seem like it, since energy is everything to survival, but maybe a modernized, more fleshed out version of the setting could consider what that would entail.

Desert Journeyman said:

The Spartan Federation
Whenever I sit down to tell her story, I cannot help but think that Colonel Corazón Santiago got in over her head. She's the "army one," and it takes a well-educated reader to recognize that her faction might owe something to the right-wing radicalism of the early 1990s. My take on Santiago is that she thinks people simply lost the will to protect their rights. That's a big statement. What rights are we talking about? Under what circumstances would they need to be physically enforced? It's actually hard to imagine any of their fellow survivors marching up to a Spartan camp and trying to force them into an unequal treaty. (Vengeance is another matter.)

Santiago is written inconsistently. The diplomatic text has her accused of and insulted as a right-wing militia compound-dweller of the Clinton era. In the Michael Ely story her apolitical, Nietzschean side of Will to Survive comes out. She believes the soft powers of Earth- all of them- doomed mankind's ability to survive, which includes the ability to make war. Therein lies the way to bridge the gap between right-wing paranoia and untrammeled survival. She would not tolerate any attempt to take away her right to bear arms, because weapons is how one keeps the homestead safe. But at any rate, the text as is gives enough lassitude to depict Spartans anywhere from primitive bunker-humpers to a futuristic fortress state worthy of her many namesakes.

As I always say, the Spartans have Erratic aggression, so they are not immediate warmongers. That's why I repurposed their Pandora xerox faction to fit that.

Desert Journeyman said:

The Human Labyrinth (a.k.a. The Human Hive)
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang thinks some people are fit to rule, others to be led. And his conclusion is that, for the species to survive, the fit must force themselves upon the unfit. Yang would say that democracy just doesn't work: people aren't willing to do the hard things. (In this, he agrees with Zakharov, Santiago, Marsh, and St. Germaine.) To give him at least the courage of his supposed convictions, I have assumed that Yang actually insists that leaders demonstrate and hone their fitness over time. Yang is indifferent to morality, but I don't think he is profligate with lives. He is hard but not cruel. People are tools that make noises if squeezed too hard.

Yang gets his maximum dystopian version in the fiction, and the clumsy depiction exists into the in-game datalinks themselves- the Hive's agenda is avowedly an "Atheist Police State", which immediately conjures up communist totalitarianism. (Though one might as well ask what Qin Shi Huang worshipped, besides himself. Imperial China often had no use for considering heaven's will at the statecraft level.) Due to each faction only having one faction, you can choose to play him as a Fundamentalist who values Wealth, which is funny.

At any rate, the source material is pretty clear about his society being underground North Korea, a Hoxhaist twist perhaps. But I believe one can take his quotes as the sole source of consideration, and moderate the Hive into a dictatorial surveillance state that has achieved a level of material comfort to provide his citizens with a higher quality of life. A post-Dengist Hive, if you will. That's pretty much what "Joe" portrays it as, which is eerie because that was written in 2000, but maybe the pre-WTO Jiang Zemin era PRC was already a pretty happening place and would've served as a plausible model, I don't know.

Desert Journeyman said:

The Lord's Conclave (a.k.a The Lord's Believers)
Sister Miriam Godwinson believes that a turn away from righteousness destroyed the Earth. This is not quite the same thing as the abandonment of a particular faith tradition. While I have no doubt that Godwinson is comfortable asserting an explicit morality, my version would trace this morality back to self-evident Natural Law.

Just how Miriam interprets that Law is the rub. I'm given over to thinking she would actually cite history, not one specific religious text, to bolster her conclusions. This creates an obvious problem: to everyone but herself, Miriam is presenting as a prophet in the Old Testament style--a person who is literally speaking what they claim is the will of God.

As with the Hive, it's easy to have the Believers go the stereotypical route. Much more difficult is to try to be literal with her datalinks agenda of "Life of religious worship", and interpret that as any and all religious faiths. But Unitarian Universalists don't stack a lot of adherents outside of Christian dispensationalist techno-thrillers screeching about One World Nation Mystery Babylon, so it's difficult to imagine what a zealous multi-faith theocracy would look like. Maybe they'd need to find a common enemy or something. The Planet itself would do nicely, what with all of the demons literally bewitching people and drilling into their skulls.

And my usual observations on Miriam as presented: in “Journey to Centauri”, the Planetfall novella by Michael Ely, she is reasonable, sympathetic, and moderate. She is less zealous than overbearing atheist Zakharov and savvy enough to try to engage his ultra-rationalist worldview on his own terms. She is pacifistic and humanitarian. She is the only faction leader besides Lal to vote against dissolving the mission. Frankly, her entire turn towards Bible-thumping fanatic might be due to her AI programmed to being Aggressive, which might make her SMAC’s very own Nuclear Gandhi, meaning character assassination by game mechanics.

Alternatively, maybe the trauma of Planetfall coupled with that mystic near-death experience she has towards the end of it and a pod full of refugees looking to her to be their messiah triggered fanaticism from her after she realized the other leaders were all lost rebellious children who had doomed the mission, thus requiring moral supremacy to reorient them towards a higher power.

Desert Journeyman said:

The Peacekeeping Forces
Commissioner Pravin Lal needs a lot of work. I think I need to reorient him from the "information freedoms" guy to the democracy guy. I think Lal must feel that despotism created circumstances incompatible with successful policy-making.

That's a rather too literal reading of the text. Everything about the Peacekeepers from their in-game agenda, to their datalinks agenda ("Humanitarian Ideals, Democracy"), to their very name and nature screams democracy. And human rights. He only talks about the free flow of information in his intro quote, and that's not even really a thing a game models. So one could assume that would be folded into the greater umbrella of basic human rights, anti-censorship, etc. The last gasp of the liberal democratic End of History in the '90s that we assumed would never go away as the dominant paradigm. Maybe this game was onto something after all.

Desert Journeyman said:

• Yang, Santiago, and Marsh all believe that a lack of willingness to struggle essentially amounted to planetary suicide. For Yang, the root cause was an obsession with participatory self-government. Marsh and Santiago feel it was timidness of spirit.

Yang is an ascetic, and has imposed his own values upon his people. But I don't think that follows from his distaste in individualism, as embodied in participatory self-government. I suppose he might be inclined to inflict sufferings upon his people, so they would learn to toil together and achieve collectivist unity, perhaps. I think that sounds more fascist than communist, the state is one organic body and all that, which works because that is still an ostensibly collectivist ideology.

Desert Journeyman said:

• Like Yang, St. Germaine believes (most) people are incapable of self-rule, which is why both men practice a form of despotism. However, St. Germaine holds that people desire stern leadership. In St. Germaine's retelling of Earth's demise, the problem was selection of the wrong despot.

All of the factions save for Lal and Skye are against self-rule. Morgan believes in equal opportunity, including the opportunity to turn your neighbor into your wage slave. Zakharov believes in equal chances at cracking the exams; after that, you can't speak unless you've published the prerequisite number of papers. Miriam's theocracy is inevitably going to lead to some sort of hierarchal rule, though it depends on what religious model her faction ultimately looks like. I forget how the Puritans or the other New England colonies ran themselves.

Desert Journeyman said:

• Both Marsh and Santiago want to promote physical excellence, but Santiago sees war as the acme of human endeavor, while Marsh believes that sport must take a central place.

Marsh, as depicted so far, has nothing to do with sport, unless being a frontiersman is considered sporting. Oh, sure, his background is as a game hunter, but everything the faction does in the fiction so far has been related to hard mountain man work. Man vs. nature is not a sport, not even for Bear Grylls, because what he does is still for a living. Other than that the rest of the descriptor sounds uncontroversially sound.

Desert Journeyman said:

• "Joiner" Banes shares some of St. Germaine's skepticism with the forms of democratic government, but I think the former is actually closer to Miriam in that he comfortably substitutes his personal sense of right and wrong in place of any consensus document. St. Germaine thinks democracy needs guard rails. Banes just thinks it requires a little "offensive" help from time to time. St. Germaine wants to avoid sharing bad news; Banes wants to take action to ensure that the news is less bad. Cobb was fascinated by the idea that the course of human history could be changed by discovering the source of humanity's self-destructive impulse, but lacked the self-discipline to take his experiments very far. Banes is more interested in how the toolkit Cobb left behind can enable him to save humanity. To understand the problem that Banes represents, look at the central problem behind DC graphic novel Kingdom Come: do superheroes disempower normal people? Banes represents this idea of the self-appointed hero. So far, in past fiction, I have been putting forth Lal in that role. Lal has begun to suspect he might require some kind of oversight to legitimize what he thinks he must do. Banes doesn't bother. St. Germaine thinks men need a father figure; Banes thinks they need a guardian angel. For St. Germaine, playing his role is fun, and everyone must participate. Banes is perfectly content to manage from behind the scenes.

So there's a lot to question about all of this. Yes, St. Germaine is portrayed as caring deeply about the information his citizens are subjected to, and thus the New State is concerned with mediating and massaging that information. But beyond that, he doesn't believe democracy needs guard rails. He frankly doesn't believe in democracy at all. He's created a neo-feudal state complete with revived aristocracy and the Church. A ren faire doesn't have any room for democracy beyond everyone gets a tomato to throw at the unfortunates in the stocks.

Banes just seems like a company man who's trying to turn things around for the business by wresting it away from the addict failson. Yes, he's got some interesting ideas for where Dreamer technology could go. But the man's personal convictions are indistinguishable from those of your average Pentagon analyst or defense contractor executive. A spook or a corpse, pick your empty suit. Why does he care about tempering a person's worst impulses? Presumably to optimize state control over fractious populations, and/or to commercialize such applications to other factions. What are "better citizens" other than those who obey his laws- or any law, the ones belonging to whomever wields the óneiromachaíri? The man has no ideology. He has no imaginative worldview, either utopian or dystopian. He is RAND Corporation personified. Next.

The problem with Dreamer tech is that while we have an understanding that Cobb is an unregenerate degenerate who's both into dreaming endlessly like an opium addict while plundering his faction and abusing his citizens like an opium lord, it's not very clear as to why exactly is it self-destructive. Does dreaming lead to potential psychological-physiological damage, as with drugs? Does it lead to the loss of self and sublimation into an artificial reality, as with digital devices? Does it lead to one creating worlds and playing god, as with magic? What is self-destructive about dream technology? What exactly makes Cobb and Cohen so nefarious, other than their capacity to mistreat human beings- and to what aims, exactly? Why does dream tech lead to the Congo Free State? You'd think their form of extraction would not require nearly as much physical labor.

Desert Journeyman said:

More than one society puts science front-and-center.

• I think the greatest distinction between Zakharov and Tamineh Pahlavi is that the ex-Soviet scientist is motivated by curiosity, and Pahlavi by fear. Pahlavi is trying to correct aspects of humanity that cause her distress--aging, infirmity, imperfection--by using science as a shield, while Zakharov is using it more like a chainsaw. In this, Zakharov is actually almost perfectly aligned with Aleigha Cohen, although in her case, the motivation is boundary manipulation for its own sake, not genuine curiosity.

Mm, that works. Still don't get what boundaries that Cohen is exactly transgressing with dream experiment. Is it Russian dog head experiments, the Russian sleep experiment, something along the lines of that? But fair, I can take that characterization of her as a given, and her active malice does distinguish her from the others.

Desert Journeyman said:

• Anhaldt's central conceit is his lack of trust in human faculties, which is a much stronger instantiation of what drives Pahlavi. As a result, Anhaldt has convinced himself and others that their lives are better off in the hands of machines. Over time, this belief is reinforced by the use of those machines to organize information in counter-intuitive ways.

The challenge there is to distinguish the Children of the Atom's ideology from other technocratic, machine-trusting, techno-salvationist factions. For instance, the University. But maybe Zakharov believes in the inherent purity and supremacy of the human mind. That's fine, there can be an element of unfounded superstitious faith even in his worldview. Maybe he believes machines require humans to watch over at some point, and that tools can't or shouldn't surpass the toolmaker.

Desert Journeyman said:

Several societies deal with the problem of information.

• Lal, Metrion, and Zakharov probably preside over the most open of the human societies on Planet. Lal is concerned that proper government can't be done in the dark. Zakharov, with a handful of exceptions for his most controversial research, essentially accepts that data must be shared to be properly mined for insights. Metrion is convinced that the legacy of Earth lies in the thought it has produced. (This sets him apart from Nagao, for whom Earth is mostly a specific location, or St. Germaine, for whom the past is comforting myth.)

Still really unclear on what Metrion's whole deal is. As in, what does he plan to do after they find the Data Core? What kind of faction does he actually want to build? What does he want to do with knowledge differently from Zakharov? That said, his goal does seem reminiscent of the SMAC Faction Pack's Preservers, who are essentially a more reflective, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, humanities-friendly version of the University. Thus follows the above adaptation of their leader.

That was terrific feedback, @Strategos' Risk. Thank you. It's taken me a few days to get around to responding, but I really enjoyed formulating my thoughts in reply.

Gaians: Agreed. Even though the original lore didn't posit huge consequences for introduction Terran organisms into the Chironian biome--a decision that may have also been inspired by the implication that Chiron was the mythical Eden and Earth was in fact Nod, humanity simply ping-ponging between the two in a grand cycle--I've assumed otherwise in my lore. Skye dabbles, at first, in crop hybridization at the time when greenhouse agriculture isn't achieving good economies of scale, then abandons it altogether once the Gaians get far enough along the Explore track to experiment with native nutrient sources. I assume that eating Chironian foodstuffs isn't exactly easy on the ol' digestive system. Here come the enzyme supplements!

I think the next iteration of SMAC could profit from a close study of factions as presented in Paradox grand strategy games. The Gaians alone must encompass some colonists closer in spirit to the Shapers who long for the familiar ecology of Earth, some who are more inclined toward the active outdoor lifestyle espoused by the Hunters, and also a hybridization movement. Isolationism is big among "our" Gaians, who have had a bad time of it at the hands of more conventionally militaristic factions, but a loud minority probably call for more confrontational tactics, too.

University: Zakharov is a builder, aye, but I think even more than a legacy of achievement, he simply wishes to know. And I say "know" rather than "understand" because, as he is presented in most fictional accounts, Zakharov seems to be presented as the genius who, after being celebrated by so many and for so long, has forgotten his own fallibility. I think the University builds the "monuments" one might expect: reactors, radio telescopes, research parks, arboretums. And surely the University would monetize its chief resource by serving as the Skunk Works of Planet, handing out Gatling Rovers to anyone with enough energy credits.

The Children of the Atom were named in reference to the concept of atomic computing, which I confess I don't really understand. The idea behind the faction is that Anhaldt lost faith in the capacity of human thinkers to successfully organize human affairs in a complex world. It was therefore a fairly natural decision for him to "entrust" the survival of his followers to an A.I. after becoming stranded.

To the extent that either faction has an aesthetic, the University is must more "atomic convertible."

Morganites: I think you're spot-on. Morgan is Id more than he is anything else. The capitalist identity fits because that's what we came to associate with pure Id in the late twentieth century. And, given that we have enjoyed the fullness of time, we're probably no longer able to perceive as clearly the aspersions being cast on Bill Gates through the medium of the original character. The likes of Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk have now eclipsed Gates, who seems the sober statesman by comparison.

I don't think other factions "neglect" energy, per se, but I think Morgan pushes to place it at the center of his plans. He is the first to experiment with buying one's way out of trouble. The first to create the technology to siphon energy from the body in return for remuneration. The first, perhaps, to buy and sell humans as energy incarnate.

For the sake of contrast, "my" Morgan governs as a simple plutocrat on a corporatist model. This sets him up to stay on a different track than either St. Germaine, whose society incorporates professional guilds, or Van de Graaf, who is more cattle baron than robber baron. A lot can be gleaned from how they treat inferiors. St. Germaine coddles them. Morgan thinks day and night how best to use them. Van de Graaf bades them get off his land.

Spartans: We share the same perspective on the Federation.

Labyrinth: Yang's Hive feels like it must have two high expressions: the bleak body horror experienced by the Drone whose humanity is never admitted, much less honored, and the carefully circumscribed path of the acolyte who is, at least in theory, taught service through the pusuit of aretḗ.

It's up to the player. The Hive can be North Korea, a threat mostly because so many people can't be easily cared for if suddenly thrust upon their neighbors, or, as you said, the PRC, testing whether the growth of economic and technological power is, in fact, "capped" in any authoritarian system.

For Yang, participatory self-government was the mechanism that gave weak-minded people too much ability to avoid that which discomfited them. Politicians were all too happy to help them defer big decisions, transfer blame to the wrong parties, and indulge their worst impulses to avoid having to engage in any genuinely helpful self-reflection or self-development. It was like putting a loaded gun in the hands of somebody in the very throes of suicidal ideation.

I think individualism is a problem for Yang. It leads, eventually, to a search for personal fulfillment that is naturally in conflict with the idea of sublimation. Even though it wouldn't theoretically be necessary for somebody to indulge every selfish impulse, the very idea of honoring the self undermines the assertion that the needs of the society are consistently more important.

Believers: I hadn't considered the idea until you mentioned it, but yes, Miriam could position herself as an adversary of Planet, even to the point of making common cause with, or absorbing, the Shapers. That could result in a cult of ancestry, I think, which probably is missing from the game, although since the intent was presumably to offer forward-looking philosophies, it's actually a sound omission.

I tend to think the decision to make the Believers an Aggressive faction was intentional. Back then, and even today, we mostly understand religious fundamentalists as minded toward the active eliminating of competing modes of thought.

Great point about Zakharov. It actually frustrates me, sometimes, that the guy who comes closest to epitomizing Mr. Spock is really one of the most vulnerable to misguided emotion, although there's some poetic justice in it.

Peacekeepers: That's a fair reading. Maybe I just feel like Lal's introductory quotation is no longer ideal if I'm also going to add a free-exchange-of-information faction on top of what is already there.

For me, Lal is all about the exploration of the democratic system and the creation of what Daniel Deudney calls Nergarchy, a system of checks and balances to prevent extremes of anarchy on the one hand and hierarchy on the other.

For story reasons, Lal is also obsessed with the Mission Charter, which he wants to use as the basis for a planetary government.

On self-rule: I think the Hunters and the Tomorrow Initiative/Institute are inclined toward "self-rule" in the same sense as Lal and Skye. In fact, one could present a very plausible version of Skye that advances matriarchy at the expense of the rights of men in her society.

I could also see the Shapers choosing Democratic politics as easily as Command economics. Even the Memory feel like they could do Democratic politics in lieu of Autocratic.

Hunters: Yes, I meant "sport" in the sense of rigorous physical activity. But it could also be a by-word for risk-taking.

Military activity is all about risk, sure, but I think the Hunters are about the kinds of risks that the military undertakes only for training and operational purposes. The Hunters are a bunch of ardenaline junkies for experience's sake.

Dreamers: Banes is a big believer in heroes. He's positing the idea that, in order for democracy to work properly, there must be a group of unaccountable people who stand outside it. He's sort of Commissioner Gordon.

Yes, Dreaming leads both to extreme physical addiction and difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Loss of self. Somnacin is similar in destructive power to Fentanyl. Those who Dream tend to want to continue to do so indefinitely, and they will pursue it with the damn-all-consequences single-mindedness known only to the addict. And since the problem is happening at the very top and trickling down, Shaper society is essentially non-functional.

In theory, the Dreamers could be understood as the faction that wants to explore the mind rather than the physical world before them. It's a completely new take on what is necessary for survival of the species.

Cobb and Cohen are simply the least-disguised about their willingness to exploit other people to get what they want. Cohen is a diagnosed sociopath.

In terms of boundaries, Cohen is essentially a Dr. Mengele-type figure. She was a major figure in the revolution in psychological compliance treatments developed for convicts in the Soviet and Communist Chinese penal systems, many of which crippled their victims.

Children of the Atom: Yeah, I would say you're right. Zakharov probably believes that the human mind is much superior to what a machine could do, while Anhaldt might regard Zakharov as the very poster child of progress-dampening egotism.

Tomorrow Institute: Metrion wants to recover the Data Core to ensure that the knowledge carried by Unity to Chiron is made available, without discrimination, to all humans. There's definitely a bit of cross-over with the Preservers. I think the society Metrion creates would indeed by very nostalgia-oriented, occupying some of the territory implicitly staked out for the Morganites (inasmuch as they felt there was nothing objectionable about what happened back on "Old" Earth).

The University thinks open networks are a necessary condition for high-yield research, but at some point, Zakharov probably does create restricted archives. The Institute sees open networks as a moral imperative.

I could see different groups forming within Institute society to celebrate particular aspects of the knowledge they find. Like groups dedicated to French Impressionism, Chinese cuisine, Greek theater, or transcendentalism.

I quite like the idea of a sub/faction that thinks of the human race as needing to expand to thrive. Sounds like Kozlov's faction is starting to answer the Three Questions.

What is the fundamental truth of the universe? Expansion. Or, we can never go home again.

Maybe they're inspired by the loners. The pioneers. The people who seek out and tame the wild spaces.

Or they're determined runaways, refusing to slow down lest they take root and be reclaimed by the soil. Here, the Venn diagram touches just slightly on Morgan's, to the extent that Morganites look at Earth and think, "Been there, eaten that. What's for dinner tonight?"

Why did civilization on Earth fail? This one is more difficult. Either a species that stays too long in one place pays a kind of resilience tax that eventually exhausts them of all their developmental capital, or staying too long in one's own home is bad for the health?

What is necessary to ensure the future of humanity? Spread to the stars.

Tonight is a good night for musings, I think.

As I have pointed out before, Venn diagrams for the original, expansion, and RtD factions overlap in interesting ways. Looking for your commentary here, intrepid readers.

Factions that think about by whom we should be governed.
The Gaians believe we should be governed by women. Precisely which women is harder to say. I assume most are rabid enthusiasts of direct democracy. Potential for pathological consensus-seeking?

Chairman Yang of the Human Labyrinth asserts that we should be governed by an enlightened ruler. Exactly what that means, only he can say, which might be the point.

The Peacekeeping Forces place their trust in representative democracy.

The New State believes that we should be governed by an elite who are bred to that purpose. So does the Human Ascendancy, come to think of it. Interesting problem to chew on: I'd never considered that the two were so similar.

The Children of the Atom say we should let computers govern on our behalf. They don't even seem to worry too much about equipping a "master programmer" to do too much of the work behind the scenes.

Morganites would say we should be governed by the people who have been most successful at accumulating wealth, the only true measure of merit.

The Restoration opts for a complete stratocracy. Officer on deck!

I assume the Pilgrims would say we should be governed by people who have property, which isn't the same as people who have moveable wealth. The idea being that occupation and improvement of land is somehow a more meaningful endeavor in this world than the accumulation of commodities. There is a kind of community benefit implied there, since most commodities are intended to be consumed by an individual.

Factions that think about what we should value.
The University says that we should value knowledge itself.

The Gaians say that we must value the health of Planet.

The Spartans say we should value the capacity to do violence, which basically means faction war-making potential.

The Morganites value wealth itself.

The Peacekeeping Forces value ethical behavior as an end unto itself.

The Lord's Conclave values the practice of faith traditions, leading to personal fulfillment.

The Human Tribe simply wants people to value their neighbors. Cracking open a can of beer is practically a civic duty.

The Dreamers of Chiron, or some percentage of them, value perception. To them, an intangible experience is every bit the equal of a tangible one.

The Tomorrow Institute wants us to value the past in the form of information. If Lal's faction articulates the government's "Responsibility to Protect," then Metrion's puts forth the "Right to Know."

The Data Angels value Jazz--the demonstration of skill in the new digital medium.

Servantism's an interesting concept, it reminds me of the "Constitutionalists" vs. "Institutionalists" in 70s Chile: it was even sharper in Argentina at the time, after the 1976 coup the junta noted that the armed forces existed before "Argentina" itself was proclaimed 1810

Thanks! As much as I love telling the alternate history of Earth, I want the conflict on Chiron to be exclusively rooted in ideological differences, not nationalistic allegiance.

Servantism, like Holnism, has major incoherences that reveal the disingeniousness of many of its strongest voices, but I liked putting Santiago forth as one of its arch-priests.

Desert Journeyman said:

Thanks! As much as I love telling the alternate history of Earth, I want the conflict on Chiron to be exclusively rooted in ideological differences, not nationalistic allegiance.

Servantism, like Holnism, has major incoherences that reveal the disingeniousness of many of its strongest voices, but I liked putting Santiago forth as one of its arch-priests.

and it makes sense for a world more dominated by "borderless" globalism and PMCs up the wazoo--Mike Hoare, Bob Denard, Roger Faulques, David Stirling, Executive Outcomes, Blackwater, Wagner, Mozart all have distinct national origins and are a step above just mercs, but are substantively different from armies ordered around by leaders; semi-rogue states like 70s Argentina or Saudi Arabia had a contrary problem, where their forces in Nicaragua or Syria kept pursuing their original mission while Buenos Aires or Riyadh realized it had to play nice with other countries: so all this can start backwashing into the regular national militaries

like I can definitely see the proto-Spartans refusing to massacre a refugee camp because they were born on the wrong bit of land or hair color or whatever--sure it's dishonorable, but also why waste a good pool of possible recruits?

[plus I like the idea of the Morganites both boosting and becoming dependent on the Spartans in some sort of mutual protection racket, this thread has many good ties between the Factions you might not otherwise expect from a superficial description]

Even on Earth, corporations have made progress supplanting nations as the repository of personal allegiance. They represent what nations once did: the promise of dignity, even purpose, through belonging, and access to perquisites such as a basic living.

You also have the atomizing impact of the Global Datalinks, which draws people outward.

The Spartans have a Holnist problem. Santiago made common cause with them to take on the U.N. but must make the admission to herself that they are mere sociopaths--racist cranks with a peculiar death wish. To justify their killing to themselves and others, they play at philosophy. Holnism is piracy. Survivalism is closer to athletic hoarding.

Thank you for engaging! I love to discuss this world.

Desert Journeyman said:

Even on Earth, corporations have made progress supplanting nations as the repository of personal allegiance. They represent what nations once did: the promise of dignity, even purpose, through belonging, and access to perquisites such as a basic living.

You also have the atomizing impact of the Global Datalinks, which draws people outward.

The Spartans have a Holnist problem. Santiago made common cause with them to take on the U.N. but must make the admission to herself that they are mere sociopaths--racist cranks with a peculiar death wish. To justify their killing to themselves and others, they play at philosophy. Holnism is piracy. Survivalism is closer to athletic hoarding.

Thank you for engaging! I love to discuss this world.

that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.
--Augustine, City of God​

heck, even pirates have a code, I feel David Brin's point in The Postman was that the Holnists start out with the products of industrial society (cheap canned food, small arms, bunkers, mined and processed gold bricks) and then think that's the "state of nature," that they thought they hit a triple when they just started on first base--that omnicide is the chance for a big picnic: but eventually they start opening fire/come under fire when they try to visit a neighbor, and have to raid once they can't buy stuff in Pocatello any more, and become another ragtag band of reavers, just PLAYING warlord

realistically a collapsed society (90s Africa and Russia, Lost-Decade Latin America) just means the landlords quickly bulk up against the remaining scattered yeoman farmers; Spartanism definitely emphasizes the "well-regulated" part of "militia" and that the only guerrillas that have made any mark in history were either Marxist-Leninists or Islamists, so you can't just fight to RESTORE any old order

As I recall, the essential thing about the apocalypse of The Postman was that it wasn't natural catastrophe or even war that caused the national collapse, but the predatory selfishness of the Holnists themselves. Adding insult to injury, they justified their taking by insisting that the Federal Government had forfeit all claim to their loyalties on grounds of its failure to solve their problems--a failure caused in no small part by the Holnists themselves.

The Holnists were the people least inclined to do the right thing, and most interested in prolonging the suffering of everyone else. One likes to imagine that they are also first to cry foul when the tables are turned and order is reimposed. Oscar van de Graaf and Pete Landers are vindictiveness personified, and it's hard not to root for both at times. I make a point that Holnists are not good fighters on the whole because selfishness is a failing characteristic in both individual soldiers and armies as a whole. They don't want to stand and fight on equal terms. They don't want to contribute to the success of others. Deep down, they can't grasp that what's good for the many can also be good for the one.

The Holnists do enough damage to inspire others with slightly different but vaguely compatible goals. Secessionists have slightly broader aims than Holnists, but they share the same underlying weakness, and in the end, they hang alone instead of together, once the United States regains its strength. This time around, there's not even the idea of a great confederacy. Texas is jealous of Missouri, and neither knows what to do with the Christian States or Florida. There are too many loyalists, too many competing agendas. Throwing in with Morgan might even hurt more than it helps: he'll send men and guns, but what he takes in return might just be more valuable.
Spartanism is more structured, yes.

also interesting that "stratocracy" ("what if Starship Troopers actually was workable?") has been popping up in AH a lot--I do say there'd be fewer invasions if armies got to vote on it Roman Republic-style: no army or horde in history has ever worked on the principle of "do what you damn well want and go home to your private safe room at the end of each day"

[I'd also like to twist the knife that the "survivalists" flock to states like ID or WV that get $1.20-1.60 from the wicked Feds for every dollar they send to Washington: that's why I bring up more realistic scenarios like rural Colombia or Brazil, where they just become goons for the landlords, which again goes against Spartanism]

Great point.

That's the beauty of these polities. They're forced to punch holes in their own beliefs just to get through the day.

Lal can't completely forswear war. Yang has to make some concession to the fact that nobody is as enlightened as he (supposedly) has become. Unbelief and doubt are frequently-visited way stations of the faithful. A symbiotic relationship imposes penalties on both participants: the Gaians leave a mark even if they wish it weren't so. Life is not a series of logic games; there's feeling, too. Money does not really buy happiness or security. Perpetual war destroys the soldier.

exploiting a compassionate, humanitarian technology to make it a crime against humanity instead is very SMAC: it'd also be interesting to see the various failures of MMI and ways the "patients" could exploit it

despite their bloodless reputation the University might be the first to cotton on that the people saying "yes, yes, I am now your meat marionette and every thought I have is externally implanted" are just saying what the researchers want to hear: they seem like they'd stock up on philosophers of science as well as just the plain scientists (just like how the Morganites are enthusiastically philistine, but would be the first to just try something)

Absolutely.

It would be very Dreamer to implant malicious memories. Something Cohen might try, with Cobb's connivance. Zakharov, too, yes. (The Dreamers, as an additional faction that inherently carves its own slice of the same narrative pie, kind of infringe upon the Mad Scientist themes previously assigned to the University and Morganites in the game's lore.)

I am also intrigued by how traumatized some of the faction leaders probably are by technology, Many boogeymen: the replacement of human workers with robots, frequent nuclear accidents, atomic war, conspiracies about the origins of the Red Flu... To whit, one of the companies in this continuity is "Safetomics."

"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" *Zak angrily goes home and scrapes the sticker saying "No Brain, No Pain" off of his food preserver*

identifying pre-Trinity manuscripts and canvases is gonna be a cinch in this timeline!

(also becoming a nuclear power seems to render even the tiniest regional power incapable of knockout strikes or conventional victories, despite their history: the entire concept of "theater appropriate" war goes right out the window)

The United States basically makes nuclear war while the going is good--before the Soviets have a strategic bomber force that can deliver a bomb of their own at very long range. We can also assume the Kremlin flinches when it comes to fighting fire with fire (literally).

Soviet energy is sapped by a prolonged rivalry with China that periodically escalates into open warfare. While the outcomes break in favor of the Soviet Union--by 2000, the Kremlin calls the shots in Kabul, Urumqi, and Ulaanbaatar--there is less appetite to confront NATO in Europe.

The Soviets do cause some trouble in the Third World. They joust with Scandanavia, forcing a hasty reappraisal of Nordic neutrality. You haven't seen the map yet, but Israel shops in the husky department and Africa is mostly carved up between colonies and settler states south of the equator, so the Soviet Foreign Ministry is a kingmaker in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. Plenty of indigenous liberation movements worldwide happy to welcome Soviet advisers.

Nuclear weapons aren't terribly useful in the kinds of wars that are most often being fought in this timeline. The fighting in South America isn't really on the kind of scale that would make a tempting target for an A-bomb. South Africa, still well-insulated by the Portuguese and Rhodesians, has no real targets of interest either. The French could theoretically drop one on North Vietnam, but then what? Using one on the Algerian coastal plain is out of the question. Britain can't use their arsenal in Kenya or Malaya. India and Pakistan commit mutual suicide. The Soviets eventually succumb to the temptation to let Iraq use a weapon against the Shah but it isn't the war-winner they hoped for. Israel's deterrent isn't one. In fact, the Soviets for decades call the Western bluff in the Third World, causing trouble where they please because they feel that the Americans no longer have the confidence to use the Bomb again. And they're correct.

the Gulf Futurism bit reminds me of the Sauds' "renovations" against alleged possible idolatry in Mecca and replacing everything with architecture that looks like a Carnival Cruise liner

MisterP said:

the Gulf Futurism bit reminds me of the Sauds' "renovations" against alleged possible idolatry in Mecca and replacing everything with architecture that looks like a Carnival Cruise liner

That’s an excellent example. It’s funny, the phrase was invented in 2012 but seems to not have brought up as much compared to similar aesthetics like Afrofuturism or Sinofuturism. The insanely impractical and gaudy plans the Saudis have been up to in the meantime under MBS’ direction are definitely very Gulf Futurist, not to mention recent productions elsewhere like the Doha World Cup.

this line of thinking came from Michael Bess's The Light-Green Society about the ways in which the Trente Glorieuses let the French consider fusion and monocultures to be at least a little “ecologique”--you have grands projets like the TGV, Ariane in Guiana, or reactors running on Nigerien yellowcake that let France be both a tech leader and basically isolate itself from everyone else

every staple of energy production has a hundred advantages but one giant downside--there's even a joke in German about this problem: "any objections?" "no, just one"

presumably Dierdre has a motto that "the fewer moving parts an energy system has, the fewer future generations will curse you for building it" (also because I’m now amused that it’s the Weather Paradigm that lets one faction spike 20 boreholes into the asthenosphere and sparks Planet’s prompt warming)

and besides, if Planet's going to have one expansive, hegemonizing species running around, why should it be the Fungus that thinks it has the right to "prune" every other species that evolved every 100MA? I mean, really

MisterP said:

this line of thinking came from Michael Bess's The Light-Green Society about the ways in which the Trente Glorieuses let the French consider fusion and monocultures to be at least a little “ecologique”--you have grands projets like the TGV, Ariane in Guiana, or reactors running on Nigerien yellowcake that let France be both a tech leader and basically isolate itself from everyone else

That is some top-tier commentary and references. It actually fits the setting quite well when you have technocratic worldviews that unintentionally end up with green tech. And this actually being pursued by the French leveraging their former colonial possessions in real life is even more delicious when in this setting the French Union are doing a more unabashed form of imperialism that makes Françafrique blush. Indeed, that is the sort of policy that Lena would praise for its technological thinking while condemn for its colonial oppression...

every staple of energy production has a hundred advantages but one giant downside--there's even a joke in German about this problem: "any objections?" "no, just one"

presumably Dierdre has a motto that "the fewer moving parts an energy system has, the fewer future generations will curse you for building it" (also because I’m now amused that it’s the Weather Paradigm that lets one faction spike 20 boreholes into the asthenosphere and sparks Planet’s prompt warming)

If I had to guess, Deirdre's end-stage Green tech would probably involve some far-future science woo that results in humans splicing in fungus spores and ending up looking like high level Harmony sponsors from Civilization: Beyond Earth. Something that in her mind would have no downsides, as it commits to what the ecosystem wants rather than human needs, no objections from a Planetary point of view. On the other hand, even in the Michael Ely novels, she's not quite discarded her humanity, nor that of her people, so maybe nah.

As to using Secret Projects in a way that's inimical to the quotes they're paired with- well, the reprisal from the mindworms tell what the Gaian acolytes would think of boreholespam.

---

So I consider the INTEGR lore the absolute nadir of what C:BE has to offer. While there are some allusions to world-building that okay, so much of the Ebner profile is just blandly positive superlatives, meaningless buzzwords, lots of "tell, don't show", and emblematic of how Firaxis got the writing of that game and its expansion wrong compared to SMAC. But the concept of a faction (or sponsor) based on green tech, as well as vaguely-defined humanitarian concerns (well, addressing climate refugees is at least a very real and relevant issue in our imminent eco-dystopia), is not bad.

And because I consider all of the SMAC factions, and several of the Alien Crossfire factions, to be big tents that can contain any number of different perspectives around their central organizing principle, I figure there is a place for Lena Ebner and her green technocrats within the Gaians, too. Not to mention, for all of the neopagan stereotypes that Deirdre gets saddled with, she was a botanist first and foremost, and you can easily imagine that her faction is full of environmental engineers, geologists, and life scientists of every kind, many of whom likely subscribe to just the non-mystic version of Lovelock's hypothesis. I also threw in some allusions as to how real-world Green politics might fall short of their avowed goals, e.g. nuclearphobia, and being a little too market-friendly. (In my different SMAC/C:BE crossover project, I had her end up with the Morganites and become a party to megacorporate greenwashing.)

Yes, the French are very much a "Fourth Way" in this setting, splitting the difference between America-led NATO and the Soviets while failing to attract a following in the Third World. The degree of "tilt" in French politics--toward the West or the Communists--changes with each election.

Slacker said:

Technical note you have a general nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in '91 but Pakistan not getting the nuke until '98.

Thank you. There are a good deal of inconsistencies and errors in the text of the photologue that will need to be cleaned up in a future concordance process.

terranova210486 said:

What can you tell us about Australia?

Strategos has at least one post that can tell you a bit about Australia.

Basically, they suffer problems with Hypersurvivalists and have a (temporary) crackup à la the Second American Civil War.

I do like these figures that could have ended up in different factions (Fox possibly fitting in with the Believers or even Morganites): it shows what unites as well as divides the factions (the ship's named the Unity, after all), and also why each leader has to periodically come down from Olympus to ask what on Planet they're all fighting about now

had Fox been a Believer it would've also fit with the more complicated Miriam we see in the quotes (while in the actual game she just spams commando scout patrols at all her neighbors at the first opportunity--it's the most disappointing faction)

MisterP said:

I do like these figures that could have ended up in different factions (Fox possibly fitting in with the Believers or even Morganites): it shows what unites as well as divides the factions (the ship's named the Unity, after all), and also why each leader has to periodically come down from Olympus to ask what on Planet they're all fighting about now

I was actually likening the mainstream Gaians to the Believers in my formulation, as the Ecological Malcontents are meant to be a heretical ("Gaian Dissenters") offshoot from Skye's Planet-loving flock. But yes, between 1) her opinion of Planetmind as a horrifying deity (which is more like how Miriam likely views her Old Testament-emphasized God, as opposed to how the Gaians views Planet as somewhat more benevolent) and 2) her almost religious zeal to seek out Planet to understand herself (again, sounds more Miriam than Deirdre), I can see how they feel more like Believers. Also, along the way they pick up other sub-groups within the Gaians who are unhappy at the status quo, so that does include opportunists like wannabe Morganite types who want to dump Green economics for Free Market.

There's also an element of apotheosis, of wanting to understand Planet to no longer be at the mercy of a god and perhaps uplift humanity into posthuman gods as well, but that probably gets lost when they get overtaken by Cha Dawn like a bunch of Call of Cthulhu cultists. (On the other hand, the Cult of Planet being motivated not by blind obedience to Planet, but rather the possibility to become godlike like Planet, could be really interesting, if contradicting the misanthropic mission of the canonical Cult.)

I also freely admit that in my desire to cross over as many characters, concepts, and factions as possible, I might be causing splat bloat, but I really like the phrase "A Thousand Nations" so that's how I roll. So yeah, sub-factions ahoy!

MisterP said:

had Fox been a Believer it would've also fit with the more complicated Miriam we see in the quotes (while in the actual game she just spams commando scout patrols at all her neighbors at the first opportunity--it's the most disappointing faction)

I have a theory that Miriam is SMAC's equivalent to Nuclear Gandhi, but that's not really borne out by either the intentional game mechanic of the Believers having Aggressive aggression (as opposed to Erratic or Pacifist), or the rather stern diplomatic text. Then again, all of the factions come off as more cartoonish in the diplo dialogue than they do in the eloquent quotes.

traveller76 said:

Questions:

1. How did Japan survive the flooding?

2. How did Saudi Arabia or just Arabia survive?

3. What is the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone?

I always love questions and feedback! Thank you very much.

1. Japan was a Status Charlie nation, losing less than five percent of its original landmass to rising sea levels. The Japanese government invested heavily in flood and erosion control schemes implemented under the supervision of environmental engineer Shoichiro Nagao (later, founder of the Shapers of Chiron). Walls, pump complexes, and the like.

2. I don't know much about Saudi history. To compensate, let me speak in comparative terms. The center of gravity in the Arab world has been in Cairo since the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, notwithstanding periodic challenges emanating from Baghdad, especially during the 1980s oil boom. Americans were always keen on Israel, but Tel Aviv had a naked pro-French tilt, so Washington's primary partners in the Middle East were Pakistan and Iran. Saudi assistance to Iraq, a Soviet ally, put Riyadh continually at odds with the United States. I imagined that the Houses of Saud and Pahlavi participated in a war of proxies using clients like Morgan Industries and Struan's Pacific Trading Company. (A nice nod to the relationship between Struan's and the Shah's government in James Clavell's novel of the Iranian Revolution, Whirwind.)

3. The Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone (IOEZ), informally "The Big E-Z," was a parcel of ocean roughly corresponding to that segment of the Indian Ocean between 45° and 105° longitude and north of 30° latitude. This territory was strewn with innumerable artificial islands, including the micro-continent of Shamash, created for commercial, military, and civil defense purposes after the 1991 Six-Minute War, when India retaliated against a rogue nuclear launch orchestrated by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

Two hundred million of refugees made their home in the Big E-Z. Significant economic activities included aquaculture (including whaling), deep-sea mining, marine salvage, shipping services, salt-farming, and piracy. Many corporations controlled private research, space launch, or submarine tender facilities in the Big E-Z. Independent nations did emerge in Shamash, where mountain peaks of up to 1,700m made possible micro-climates that could sustain crop agriculture and ranching. Borehole mines reaching depths of more than eight miles yielded rich petroleum and peerless gemstones.

United Nations relief efforts were constantly underway from the time of the war until the launch of the Unity Mission in November 2071. Various Great Powers, including Britain, Iran, the U.S.S.R., and China, jockeyed for influence in the Race for Hearts and Minds.

Check out post #11 of this thread for more on the IOEZ.

Desert Journeyman said:

The new island clusters are artificial. The largest of these, Shamash, can be found in the Southern Indian Ocean, roughly equidistant between Australia and Madagascar. That name, Hebrew for "servant," was used again on Chiron.

Why would they reuse the name of a new continent? At least prepend New to the name.

Desert Journeyman said:

NATO dared not deplete local forces in Europe. Canada was reduced to accepting military assistance from the likes of the Southern African Treaty Organization.

Doesn't this contradict the fact that British Commonwealth/Imperial troops are mentioned as aiding Canadian authorities, which was mentioned in the profiles of various characters?

Desert Journeyman said:

Hawaii is independent, probably a fluke of presidential politics.

The U.S. literally falls apart during the Second American Civil War. Reclaiming former Pacific coaling stations probably isn't high on the reconstruction priorities.

a remnant of the Triple Alliance War and Paraguayan hegemony during the late nineteenth century.

lmao the idea of Paraguay victory against all of Argentina and Brazil, avoiding its horrific defeats in history is absolutely bonkers, and I am here for it

In 2017, Soviet tanks rumbled forth into Xinjiang.

Some explanation as to when and how China has fallen apart and weakened can be helpful to explain how the Soviets can try to set up a Third East Turkestan Republic.

African independence remained an elusive dream as of 2071.

But, it sounds like from the rest of the description that vast wedges of the continent do go independent? Otherwise what are Chad, Rwanda, or much of Congo doing having their own foreign policies rather than being subject to the control of Dakar, Usumbura, and Léopoldville?

White settlers still ruled in Algiers, Nairobi, Luanda, Lourenço Marques, Salisbury, and Pretoria.

I understand that this setting is a patchwork one, where multiple divergences coexist for the sake of an aesthetic direction and rule of cool. I've coined a name for the concept, myself. But persisting the minority dominant colonies all of the way to the 2070s is a very hard pill to swallow and has some exceedingly dark ramifications about what is going on in those lands to maintain such ironclad rule.

Now, the idea of the European powers figuring out how to square the circle and managing to hold on to some colonies is perhaps arguable for- there is at least the example of Gabon wishing to remain part of France, but the French deigning because of the expense required. So maybe in some lands, the native peoples agree to continued overlordship in exchange for an arrangement that is agreeable to them. Indefinite minority governments is not an example of that, and in a world where the Soviets are still around (not to mention the Cubans, East Germans, maybe Yugoslavs) to raise hell in the name of third world solidarity, it's really hard to see the white elites could plausibly stay overtly in power for over a century.

Katanga and South Kivu were kept afloat by Belgian mining interests.

Neocolonialist secessionist regimes that were, at least, not settler-run ones.

Iran runs the table to the west.

east.

Desert Journeyman said:

The center of gravity in the Arab world shifted from Islamabad to Cairo after 1991, notwithstanding periodic challenges emanating from Baghdad. Americans were always keen on Israel, but Tel Aviv had a naked pro-French tilt, so Washington's primary partners in the Middle East were Pakistan and Iran. Saudi assistance to Iraq, a Soviet ally, put Riyadh at odds with the United States. I imagined that the Houses of Saud and Pahlavi participated in a war of proxies using clients like Morgan Industries and Struan's Pacific Trading Company. (A nice nod to the relationship between Struan's and the Shah's government in James Clavell's novel of the Iranian Revolution, Whirwind.)

I don't think Pakistan was ever in a position to be the leader of the Arab world, not simply because they're not Arab, but because other than being a nuclear power, they were always peripheral to the Middle East. I also don't get why Struan's is such a heavy-hitter on Earth. On Planet, yes, they were a major mission contractor and has their own faction. But Struan's Pacific getting up to trouble in the Mideast seems ludicrously out of scope. Surely there were many more megacorporations active on the homeworld who could be Morgan's rival.

Desert Journeyman said:

Independent regional powers like India, Pakistan, Argentina, and Iran developed atomics as the bluntest sort of insurance against their traditional adversaries.

If Brazil never went independent, why would Argentina want nukes? Did the British station some in the Falklands? I don’t see why Portugal would choose to threaten Argentina, especially existentially.

If West Germany can have nukes, I wonder if the Soviets might allow some to be stationed in East Germany. I’d think by the 21st century Indonesia, the Saudis, maybe Egypt might be trying to get them as well. Not to mention whatever is going on with the Koreas.

Desert Journeyman said:

Major commercial nuclear and radiation accidents, defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as events involving damage to reactor cores and significant radiation release, occurred at an average rate of three per year in the United States and Canada,

That is an absolutely insane number that would have doomed nuclear power decades early. What kind of a civilization would be fine with that rate of cancer geysers for over a century?

Desert Journeyman said:

U.N. Chief of Staff to the General Secretary Pravin Lal described cruisers as "the last bastions of scoundrels," for they possessed enough crew and firepower to conduct essentially independent foreign policy. The theory behind twentieth and twenty-first-century cruiser warfare could be heard echoing on Chiron where military units were at times ungovernable and needed to be given extreme latitude because of basic communications difficulties.

Desert Journeyman said:

Rudimentary national intranets created a phenomenon called the Splinternet, meaning that information exchange had a variable rate of speed, proceeding speedily within the same language bloc but slowly between blocs. Scientific and cultural experience became fragmented. A Soviet scientist knew of theories and techniques his American counterparts did not, and vice versa.

Neat.

Strategos' Risk said:

Why would they reuse the name of a new continent? At least prepend New to the name.

Honestly, I thought of it as an example of the extreme homesickness that afflicts most of the survivors. It's also a word with disturbing implications toward a living Planet.

Strategos' Risk said:

Doesn't this contradict the fact that British Commonwealth/Imperial troops are mentioned as aiding Canadian authorities, which was mentioned in the profiles of various characters?

Imperial troops wouldn't necessarily have been diverted from Europe. There were probably at least some British troops in Canada, but the Continental powers probably sent only a de minimis contribution.

Strategos' Risk said:

The U.S. literally falls apart during the Second American Civil War. Reclaiming former Pacific coaling stations probably isn't high on the reconstruction priorities.

It was difficult for me to get around the size of the U.S. military presence otherwise.

Strategos' Risk said:

lmao the idea of Paraguay victory against all of Argentina and Brazil, avoiding its horrific defeats in history is absolutely bonkers, and I am here for it

I've always had the impression that Paraguay had some very bad luck and could in fact have won some of the battles that occured early in the war that might have led to a different outcome overall.

Strategos' Risk said:

Some explanation as to when and how China has fallen apart and weakened can be helpful to explain how the Soviets can try to set up a Third East Turkestan Republic.

It's less that China falls apart than that the Soviets and Chinese fight a war that goes badly for China.

Strategos' Risk said:

But, it sounds like from the rest of the description that vast wedges of the continent do go independent? Otherwise what are Chad, Rwanda, or much of Congo doing having their own foreign policies rather than being subject to the control of Dakar, Usumbura, and Léopoldville?

That's correct.

Strategos' Risk said:

I understand that this setting is a patchwork one, where multiple divergences coexist for the sake of an aesthetic direction and rule of cool. I've coined a name for the concept, myself. But persisting the minority dominant colonies all of the way to the 2070s is a very hard pill to swallow and has some exceedingly dark ramifications about what is going on in those lands to maintain such ironclad rule.

Now, the idea of the European powers figuring out how to square the circle and managing to hold on to some colonies is perhaps arguable for- there is at least the example of Gabon wishing to remain part of France, but the French deigning because of the expense required. So maybe in some lands, the native peoples agree to continued overlordship in exchange for an arrangement that is agreeable to them. Indefinite minority governments is not an example of that, and in a world where the Soviets are still around (not to mention the Cubans, East Germans, maybe Yugoslavs) to raise hell in the name of third world solidarity, it's really hard to see the white elites could plausibly stay overtly in power for over a century.

The West is considerably less receptive to self-determination because Cold War hysteria has been ramped up by several orders of magnitude. Aside from the value of their raw materials, Europeans also wanted colonies as nuclear testing grounds, and to provide outlets for emigration due to flooding and industrial accidents. The U.N., too, is forced to mute its criticism because of its dependence on space elevators.

The preservation of the Portuguese Empire also does quite a bit to shore up the Rhodesian and South African regimes.

Certain accommodations to local rule might be in place, depending. Perhaps Lebanon is managed by something like the confessional power-sharing agreement established at its independence in OTL.

Strategos' Risk said:

east.

Yes, west.

Strategos' Risk said:

I don't think Pakistan was ever in a position to be the leader of the Arab world, not simply because they're not Arab, but because other than being a nuclear power, they were always peripheral to the Middle East.

Good point. Egypt, then.

Strategos' Risk said:

I also don't get why Struan's is such a heavy-hitter on Earth. On Planet, yes, they were a major mission contractor and has their own faction. But Struan's Pacific getting up to trouble in the Mideast seems ludicrously out of scope. Surely there were many more megacorporations active on the homeworld who could be Morgan's rival.

It's a conglomerate. The name long ago ceased to fully encompass all of its functions, much the way Nestle owns clothing brands as well as snack food companies. Struan's is active worldwide.

Strategos' Risk said:

If Brazil never went independent, why would Argentina want nukes? Did the British station some in the Falklands? I don’t see why Portugal would choose to threaten Argentina, especially existentially.

For the Argentines, it's a question of prestige. But I assume there would be some natural tensions with the Brazilians, even if they are governed by the Portuguese.

Strategos' Risk said:

If West Germany can have nukes, I wonder if the Soviets might allow some to be stationed in East Germany. I’d think by the 21st century Indonesia, the Saudis, maybe Egypt might be trying to get them as well. Not to mention whatever is going on with the Koreas.

Probably. Korea was nuked a few times by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. The Soviets occupied the extreme northeast, but Korea is otherwise united. The North was wrecked.

Strategos' Risk said:

That is an absolutely insane number that would have doomed nuclear power decades early. What kind of a civilization would be fine with that rate of cancer geysers for over a century?

A civilization that has become addicted to cheap power and enthralled by the possibilities of nuclear propulsion for space travel at meaningful fractions of light speed.

The Atoms for Peace program boomed. Mining companies use "small" devices routinely.

We can assume significant improvements in radiological medicine over OTL, given the higher prevalence of cancers.

and cryosleep has the advantage of all that strontium-90 and cesium-137 in the "patients" being able to "cool down" since it's not dependent on biological processes

Each new stage of development in the relationship between humanity and its sources of free power has had a cloudy shadow to the proverbial silver lining. Coal was hailed for replacing the endless muck and runoff produced by draft animals. Oil (also a generous legacy of the Paleozoic) would clear the skies of soot and ash, and take with it rickets and tuberculosis. Petroleum had so few externalities that it took decades for Arrhenius to ponder the danger of its single downside (which would occur precisely because of its lack of all short-term disadvantages). After decades denying the effects of carbon dioxide (the same effects it suddenly recognizes and promises to solve), the fission industry has proposed so many fantastic reactor designs to compensate for current externalities that it might simply be more economical to scour the Levant for the mythical djinni that Solomon conjured. Hydroelectric dams and tidal yokes have managed to unite conservationists and the commercial fishing industry in opposition, their effects hidden below the skin of the sea. Direct photovoltaic has famously led to today's conflicts and nonstate monopolies over rare-earth minerals.

So geothermal from the seemingly-limitless energy of the asthenosphere, or the achievement of fusion on a scale to provide the requisite terawatt-hours, indeed shows promise, just as all the now-unsatisfactory sources did before. A new imbalance had been struck long ago--if not in the Paleocene, then after Tamerlane left 14th-century Europe with the most water- and windmills per capita in history--and it is not liable to balance itself without a tremendous shift in mankind itself. This is why we still speak of "energy" as an urgent and ever-growing need, rather than an input to an existing system of production, transportation, and consumption.

-- Prometheus and Phaëthon, 2037

also props to this Big History diagram Deviantart's clattering machinery recommended to me
and a link to the 50s nuclear plane experiment that cost almost as much as the Manhattan Project, they shut it down when the Hail Mary suggestion was to make it radio-controlled

A short note about what's next for this space.

I plan to continue updating this space with new content into the foreseeable future. It's a source of great satisfaction and accomplishment for me. I especially enjoy hearing from readers.

This project could benefit from a concordance that corrects the record on inconsistencies both large and small, but I judge that it is yet of lesser importance compared to new storytelling.

Sharing the rough map of Earth circa 2071 was a significant project milestone. I hope it brought to everyone a better understanding of the nature of civilization on Earth at the time of Unity's departure.

Many readers understandably wish to see a map of Chiron with settlements and territories described. Some version of that is possible using the same tools that I applied to make the map of Earth, but it is hard to emphasize just how much time map-making takes with my very basic skills.

This project could benefit from both somebody who is more scientifically literate than myself and from an illustrator who wants to tackle map- and icon-making.

Complementary side projects now at varying stages of completion include: faction leader profiles designed in the original style of the Firaxis website, a library of icons in the style of the original game for technologies, facilities, and doctrines; and a treatment for a forum-based megagame in this setting. The first two activities are geared toward making the fan fiction more immersive. A few people have asked for faction and leader profiles since the start of this thread.

I welcome everyone to take a gander at the quotations, technologies, and other information captured on the GoogleDoc for this project. You should see the (very preliminary) concordance as well as a tab called "Faction Analysis" that will let you get some insight into the way I envision that the factions of this continuity would translate into a follow-on iteration of the computer game.

I am scheduled to attend GenCon 2023. I hope to find a good deal of inspiration there as I take in the creative output of others and play in some live megagames for the first time.

Thanks for being involved!

Let's talk about our impressions of some of the standout personalities behind the distinctive ideologues of the Alpha Centauri setting. We'll begin with three of my favorites.


Zakharov is always first in my mind when I get to thinking about this game. His great flaw is certitude. Outsized self-confidence has led him into authoritarianism. And it's been a comfortable ride. He needs (and heeds) no counsel. Rules are for lesser intellects. I can easily imagine that all the bureaucracy built into the University's academic life is really just intended to make it next to impossible to disturb the great leader himself.

Does Zakharov's intensely logical mind eventually drive him to discard all emotional consideration so that he becomes as dispassionate as Chairman Yang? Would Zakharov ever order the execution of the medical hard cases in his care? If he did, would he feel any remorse? We know he has a history of sacrificing others on the altar of Soviet material progress--or, more cynically, career advancement. Zakharov's opportunities for human interaction are already severely limited--and not only because he is anti-social. Most of Zakharov's colony is convalescent. Androids abound. It is easy to think that Zakharov would begin to draw comparisons between the two populations--perhaps with an unfavorable slant toward the sick and dying.

Despite believing that anti-science attitudes doomed the Earth, I can't imagine those misgivings being very meaningful within the University camp. Vaccination, genetically-modified crops, and public education are probably the only options--but very satisfying ones. I don't see the foundations for any kind of supremacist crusade. (We'll leave that to Pahlavi.)

If Zakharov fears anything, it's his own mortality. His mind and body are slowing with age. He placed the entire expedition in jeopardy, committing mutiny, just for the opportunity to extend his own life. (Garland at first wanted only to perform damage control, whereas Zakharov insisted on repairs so that the ship wouldn't have to perform a decades-long slingshot maneuver. Garland's initial proposal would have sacrificed those already awake--a few thousand for the sake of a half-million. More than Zakharov could bear.)

Were this a Paradox game, the University player would be hindered by maluses during any interaction with a leader that could plausibly threaten Zakharov's self-image, particularly Tamineh Pahlavi, Deirdre Skye, Johann Anhaldt, and Aleigha Cohen. (One iteration of the Ascendancy had it that they were exiles from the University due to their obsessive focus on human cloning.) Zakharov is more comfortable in the presence of other powerful men whose achievements are in fields he sees as frivolous--money men, military men, and "hobbyists" like J.T. Marsh.


"My" Deirdre Skye is sometimes a hero, sometimes a poignant case study in what happens when somebody gets too close to the event horizon of human contradiction.

As a minor aristocrat, Skye harbors vestiges of noblesse oblige, a feeling that something is owed by her, and by people like her, to anyone who did not receive the same preferments in life. Perhaps she has recognized the contradictions inherent to such an attitude; perhaps not. (How can Skye claim to "owe" someone the benefits of leadership without first deigning them subordinate to herself?)

As an iconoclast, she has done more than her fair share of barrier-breaking--in her profession, in the environmental resistance movement, in Pakistan, and in the Unity Hydroponics Bay, where her leadership was the decisive factor in buying time to evacuate the seeds that later fed a whole world.

She's a bomb that ticks. For a time, she obeys Garland from a place of seemingly deep trust. She endures Zakharov's paternalism out of misplaced respect for his accomplishments. But when Garland sends her to Hydroponics, she exceeds her own authority to commandeer some of D'Almeida's security officers and joins in the firefight herself.

Skye respects Chief Medical Officer (later Commissioner) Pravin Lal, whose values she admires (and to whom she and her people owe their salvation). (Unlike, say, van de Graaf or Mercator, Skye's personal interests were never affected by some of the U.N.'s less admirable maneuvers, so she has no reason to doubt Lal's judgement.)

But Skye, an optimist at heart, has suffered badly from the banality of evil. She has never forgiven herself for the murders of the local support staff she recruited in the North-West Frontier Province. To her, the patriarchy is baffling. Women aren't a threat to men. Oppression is destructive to the oppressor as well as to the oppressed. But the very authorities that should have protected the vulnerable instead demonstrated astonishing cynicism. What is the purpose of all that power, if not to protect? Who does it serve to rationalize those attacks? Were the police opposed to equality in principle, or merely ashamed that a terrible crime had occurred on their watch? Either way, their exasperation and uselessness have haunted Skye ever since. Why was she so offensive to them?

To this day, Skye spends long hours wandering the perimeter of Gaia's High Garden, reliving her worst memories.

The story so far implies that the Gaians are a hunted people, forced into fungal swamps where other factions cannot follow. They remain there for decades in a posture of arrested development thanks to a general blockade maintained by hostile neighbors and a philosophy that prevents development of a modern industrial base.


Commander Kleisel Mercator is actually closest in outlook to a sober Factor Roshann Cobb: he has become convinced that the human species will destroy itself. But if Cobb wants to lobotomize the patient, Mercator wants to distract him instead.

Mercator's first problem is that he is trying to form a society made up of people who have been (and probably must continue to be) socialized in ways that are antithetical to it. His military officers are playing house, which is a civilian's game. "You can't handle the truth!" might as well be a faction catchphrase, but it works in more than just the one way. Kleisel's people are professional killers. That's how they interact with the world.

Mercator's second problem is that he is terrified of Planet. Zakharov and Metrion ultimately resolve to kill what they do not understand, but the Memory of Earth are cowed by it, demonstrating a respect on par with the Hunters--not as self-negating as the Gaians, but still heavy enough that they are never quite at ease. Mercator is at the forefront of leaders clamoring to leave Chiron.

The faction's starting pieces, which include veteran militia and a Hopper, will tempt the player into an aggressive posture, so let us assume that Mercator is as egotistical in his own way as a Zakharov or a Morgan. Not sneering, but impatient. If you don't share his concern that inter-factional warfare will doom us all, he's happy to lock you in the brig and impose martial law on your bases until you come to your senses and accept vassalage.

Sources:
Drawings of Zakharov and Skye are by Feivelyn on DeviantArt.

Portait of Brent Spiner by Rory Lewis.

heh, pairing them together like this makes it look like Zak just constantly starts the messes and Dieds is the one who has to clean them up, from Unity schisms to whatever fun microbes got out of the labs this week (somehow I'm reminded of an incident in Hanford, WA, where they were burying "hot" mud in trenches to save for later" and instead a physicist crunched the numbers and woke everyone up in the middle of the night because they had to redistribute that mass of mud RIGHT NOW)

Gaian biotech's more “you put the plasmid in the bacteria and the bacteria in a vat and the vats in a basement and a biocontainment on the basement because of the Precautionary Principle”; also they use incessant kitchen metaphors (especially since that's sorta how they started before and during Planetfall)

besides David Brin, there's an actual 30s Japanese ideology that Santiago would've had to work her way around (and a movie): basically she's an honest soldier trapped in a military structure that values nothing else than advancement and armed forces for armed forces' sake--but loyalty to subordinates and refusal to let any branch just drop its mission for eternal self-perpetuation

a decade earlier or later she would've been someone--if not a Napoleon, then a Ney: but instead it was her destiny to make several "security companies" actually live up to their names, and thus align with the UN, and thus be listed to the Unity

MisterP said:

besides David Brin, there's an actual 30s Japanese ideology that Santiago would've had to work her way around (and a movie): basically she's an honest soldier trapped in a military structure that values nothing else than advancement and armed forces for armed forces' sake--but loyalty to subordinates and refusal to let any branch just drop its mission for eternal self-perpetuation

a decade earlier or later she would've been someone--if not a Napoleon, then a Ney: but instead it was her destiny to make several "security companies" actually live up to their names, and thus align with the UN, and thus be listed to the Unity

Santiago's treachery toward the U.N. embodies the Gekokujō archetype, although she was always a Fifth Columnist. There wasn't a possibility she would have vested her loyalties with Garland and the Charter permanently. She was too

You can see clear ambitions of serving a worthy cause during her time with the Florida State Fencibles militia. I don't know whether I've shared it on this space, but before Miami, Santiago was in New Los Angeles, where she was with the Red Panthers community security forces.

According to her history, though, there is an even more prominent through-line for Santiago's story. Basically, she's a misfit adventurer. In 1919, she'd have gone east to fight for the Whites or the Reds, then ended up in a place like the Chaco or Ethiopia, and eventually, Spain, before perhaps crossing the Pyrenees to volunteer with the Maquis. Today, she'd be an independent foreign volunteer serving with the Ukrainians. As it was, her politics are hard to track: she moved in extremist circles and supported Florida independence (although given the timing, after the original secession from the Union, it could have been the best of bad options as the Christian States muscled south), but then joined California state forces. (California remained loyal to the federal government.) She's traded fire with Los Angeles gangs, the Los Angeles Police Department (implied), Christian States forces, U.S. Government responders in Miami, and northern California Holnists.

in the Donbas there's the Wagner Group of course (led by someone who started as a hot-dog vendor), and their main foreign opposition was the punny Mozart Group, which disbanded January after drunkenly condemning their Ukrainian bosses; presumably hers is the John Cage Group--"you'll never hear us coming"

post/Soviet gangsters setting up 10 undetectable neutron sources to converge around certain spots on the train tracks outside Tashkent so they can be alerted by the signal that any fissible material makes when it drives through

" Acoustic Kitty" probe team test getting past the Turing Police, The Great Heap 2245 (Free Drones)

pics reminded me of Stray (2022)

I was always partial to the phrase "Kurzweil Kops" as a royalty-free variant of the Turing Police.

Moravec Marshals, Roko's Basilisks ...

Had a request to know what project ideas got left on the cutting room floor. Glad to oblige.

The answer to that question properly begins with a short story. If you don't know about Nick Stipanovich's blog Paean to SMAC, you ought to go read it. A tour de force of literary critique by somebody who very clearly loves the game. One of the visitors was none other than Brian Reynolds himself. I took the opportunity of our chance encounter in the comments section to pose a question: were there any faction ideas for the original game that didn't make it over the finish line? To my amazement, Reynolds said there were not.

We'll take it by faction.

University of Planet - Not much pruned away here. At one point, Pahlavi and Anhaldt were actual or potential subordinates. Zakharov's fears for his own mortality are a relatively new addition. I can't recall where I encountered that concept. Perhaps in the GURPS material.

Gaia's Stepdaughters - What you see is essentially what you get. The particulars about her parents' divorce apparently come from the GURPS sourcebook. At one point, I debated giving her the title of "Speaker." In some earlier versions of the story, she was a native of Northern Ireland, not a Free Scotland. I pondered making the Hunters of Chiron a cadet faction of the Gaians at one point because of their shared attitudes toward conservation.

Human Hive - No big changes.

Morgan Industries - At certain points in the past I've been less well-disposed toward the name "Morgan Industries," which I viewed as too egotistical, until I decided that was the point. Their alternate name was "Dynamic Enterprise," which I sometimes still use. At times, van de Graaf was a partner that went rogue. Morgan Industries has become more villainous over time.

Spartan Federation - Their current militia is the Myrmidons, but in my early notes they are called the Phalanx. I've used the Hunters as a cadet for the Spartans, too, based on Marsh's attitude toward physical fitness. Old notes put Santiago's origins in Peru.

Peacekeeping Forces - Lal's personal history is case study in the dangers of pathological consensus-seeking, but the story of his governance is much more flattering because of how much space he makes for humility. I don't usually have much to say about the death of his wife. In versions of the story I have told elsewhere, Lal works hard to convert ex-Spartans to his cause. His chief antagonists are neither Spartans or Hivemen, but Charterists, because of the parallels to slavery.

Lord's Conclave - Elsewhere, I've called them Believers. Sometimes her appellation is "Prophet." She has at times originated in both the Christian States and the United States. In a very early version of the story, she was a straightforward Dominionist who simply wanted to destroy anyone that would not accept absorption into her religious community.

The New State - St. Germaine has been a nobleman from southern France, a Quebecois, and a Maronite Christian from Lebanon. His faction is a consolidation of two older versions, one with the same name, and the other called "The Beneath." The latter was a wholesale replacement for the Nautilus Pirates, with a much heavier lean toward environmental conservation that traced back to a belief that civilian on Earth had failed because they poisoned the oceans. In very early notes, their leader was the ship's Executive Officer, Francisco d'Almeida. Today, St. Germaine would probably qualify as an "illiberal democrat"--the kind of person who wants certain media suppressed, or certain people arrested, on grounds that they are damaging to the common good. The First Cut New State straightforwardly an implementation of feudal kingship. D'Almeida's original appellation was "Lord of the Manner." They used to start with a Foil, not a Pressure Hull (submarine).

New Two Thousand - Oscar van de Graaf has at times between a Native American, but in all other respects his story has been consistent. He was once "Conquistador," not "Empreassario." He had a Future Work called The Settlement Charter. For some inscrutable reason, I have a notation that they once started with a Unity Chopper.

The Tribe - Not much change. Sometimes, the notes seem to make out that Landers and his faction are villains--persecuted to the point that they live only for a bloody vengeance.

The Human Ascendancy - Pahlavi was sometimes raised in Switzerland, sometimes in Iran, with stronger or weaker association to the eponymous ruling dynasty. Pahlavi, like Cohen, has a history that links her to the ARC and the American Vault Program. This was part of an effort to give each of the leaders some prior history with one another. The Human Ascendancy has a sub-theme of gerontocracy and attempts to reverse the aging process.

Tomorrow Institute/Initiative - No major changes. They're incomplete themselves.

Children of the Atom - I've only recently begun building them out. A recent post dealt with their origins.

Hunters of Chiron - No major changes. At one point, Marsh was functionally a dinosaur hunter because there was a bigger link to Jurassic Park. He also did some work for Morgan Industries in one treatment, but that no longer fits his personality.

Dreamers of Chiron - The only major change is that the two faction leaders were once in a romantic relationship, but I discarded that, or at least didn't address it any further, as time went on because I didn't want to distract from the characters as individuals.

There were a number of other factions created over time. Tomorrow Rising was a "balancing" faction led by an Indonesian woman whose raison d'etre was to preserve a balance of power on Chiron. They eventually became the Memory of Earth.

I have some incomplete notes for a faction called the Archimedes Group led by an Indian prison commissioner, Sardul Singh. The concept was that they were trying to create a superior society through stage-managing every aspect of its physical surroundings, but the faction was too similar to the Human Hive.

At one point, the Holnists were "Tremaynists." Eventually, I just decided to have an overt homage to David Brin.

do appreciate how for each SMAC faction that survived you have 2-3 smaller and far less competent ones that show instead just how bad it could've been (and also the overall feeling that there was someone better for the job of leading a faction and articulating its ideology than Santiago, Dierdre, Zakharov, etc., but they were left behind 2060 or were killed before the canonical colony pods landed and started trundling around so we're left with second-stringers)

and all the time the science hippies are presumably taking detailed notes and devising properly consensual ways to divvy up who gets to be the control group for the Isle of the Deep Trance Dance, they're trying to make a Bene Gesserit out of scratch

Hahaha. I've always felt the Hive was working hardest to get there, but I can see how the Gaians might, too.

traveller76 said:

Do we have any idea of the population of the various factions and settlements?

Short answer, yes. Take a look at the column BC on the spreadsheet tab "Faction Analysis" in the setting notes here.

The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.
--Machiavelli, The Prince

Mercenaries have it rough.

I think Machiavelli's warnings aren't especially relevant in most settings where mercenaries are used today.

Until very recently, Wagner was just another arm of the Russian army, and indeed the loyalty of that institution is in about the same condition.

Modern mercenarism has four distinct faces.

1. Cold War mercenaries were pursuing a lifestyle and had very firm political allegiances. The Westerners fighting for the FNLA, UNITA, South Africa, and Rhodesia were in it for the lifestyle as much as for the (comparatively) bad pay, and would not have defected to the independence movements or the Soviets for better terms.
2. Starting about 1990, the corporate mercenary emerged to provide services to governments that could pay them. These forces looked more like Praetorian Guards-in-waiting, but they were generally more professional, and more effective, than the armies of the states and causes they usually served. Examples include Executive Outcomes, Sandline International, and MPRI. Many of these companies are tied so closely to national governments through contracting and other features of modern electronic business processes that there is really no meaningful divergence politically, and no risk of defection.
3. Overlapping the end of the Cold War era and through to today, some mercenaries are willing to be recruited into private armies. The guys that attempted coups in Equatorial Guinea, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe all fall into this category. Money seems to be the overriding thing, although their choice of targets is usually influenced by the level of pushback they assume will come with success.
4. Wagner represents a new, fourth phase in which mercenary units act as extensions of the state to carry out false-flag operations in the same manner as the privateers of old.

Mercenarism on Chiron takes place in two distinctive contexts.

• Mercenaries--soldiers for hire--explicitly accompany Morgan (SafeHaven and others), Van de Graaf, and Cobb/Cohen (Sabre Corporation). In the case of Cobb/Cohen, they expected to return to Earth. In each case, they are among the elite of the early colonies--favored because of their critical importance to regime stability, and because they probably supply the first overall military commanders for their respective factions. They are used early and often to take plunder and territory, and they take extremely heavy casualties during the first few years of service to the point that they're a non-entity. At this phase, the mercenaries are oriented toward "traditional" military missions, while faction militia are focused on security, policing, and base defense. By M.Y. 10, however, the mercenary outfits are basically just highly celebrated veteran units within the larger framework of increasingly robust faction militaries.
• Organized for-hire military providers and culturally militaristic communities both later emerge as part of the inter-faction economy and through the vagaries of Chironian geopolitics. They might be functionally independent from the big factions, like SMACERs, or they might be like Wagner--effectively arms of policy for the factions from which they hail. Thus, it's not all that hard for ambitious people with means to put together expeditions or war parties of hired guns, and it happens occasionally that faction leaders use mercenary companies as a kind of semi-concealment of their direct involvement in the wars waged by their allies.

Desert Journeyman said:

You're not forgotten!

The main website for this venture is down, so I've been going back to my notes and planning for future updates. Also on holiday this week.

Thinking to do some work on the naming for a few factions, particularly the Children of the Atom (Anhaldt) and the Tomorrow Institute (Metrion). Not confident those names are immediately evocative of what those two are really all about.

Children of the Atom might end up being the Digital Oracle.

The Tomorrow Institute is actually utterly backward-looking and is something like a conservatorship for Earth's combined knowledge. In fact, Metrion probably should be given Lal's faction quote--about control of information. I'm most inspired by the Anti-Ozymandias Protocol from the megagame An Unraveled Tapestry by a fellow named Cetashwayo.

Thoughts from the readership?

Regarding the Children of the Atom:

If there is no need to keep secrecy about their mode of governance, then "Children of the Machine" or "The Enlightened Technocracy" (with "enlightened" meaning that it now rules for the people).

If there is still a need to keep secrecy (as was suggested early on), then "Architects of Tomorrow" would fit, I think. It is vague enough to not reveal the nature of what they are building.

Although I don't think it is a good idea, it is also possible to make it deliberately misleading: it could be "the Humane Project", both to reference the project, their tendency towards diplomacy and their aversion towards just supressing dissent through force.

Regarding the Tomorrow Institute:

"The Legacy Iniciative" would reference both their decide to preserve the past and share it. Aside from that, I can only provide the terms "Remembrance" and "Preservators" in case someone can think of a good sounding name with them .



My workload is finally going down and my health has somewhat improved. Although I will still prioritize resting and recovering, I think I will be able to come here a bit more often in the coming weeks. Can't guarantee it though ><.

the Human League, or the Human Fund, perhaps

Good point about the secrecy, @Guillermo Diez. I think "The Children of the Atom," transitioning to "The Digital Oracle," is the best option. This allows the faction to obscure its motivations initially but then corrects what I might call their "labeling problem" by making it easier to understand what Anhaldt does: prediction. In game-mechanical terms, the Children/Oracle are one of a few "service" factions, joined by the drug-slinging Dreamers or the tile-improving Hunters.

Your perception of Anhaldt as a mediator (that was his original sobriquet) is a correct one, but I think, because we already have a separate technocratic faction (the Peacekeepers), another faction that uses "Human" in its full name (the Ascendancy), and a Cyborg faction seeking to mechanize people (the Cybernetic Consciousness), it is best to try to go in a different direction.

The Legacy of Earth might be a good replacement name for the Tomorrow Institute. Plus, it sidesteps the trope of adding a faction with words like "Institute" or "Foundation" in the name, which I think is over-used.

The below content is written according to the template of the 1999 SMAC game manual. It follows the same style and reproduces, then builds on the language and formats thereof. Those familiar with the game should see many hints of new game mechanics that are nevertheless in keeping with the original themes.

Getting Started
Introduction
Welcome to Racing the Darkness, a portfolio of multimedia projects set in the universe of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a 1999 computer game developed by FIRAXIS Games™.

These creative, not-for-profit works, like the game by which they were inspired and on which they remain predicated, offer perspectives on a question that has preoccupied members of our species since time immemorial: how now shall we live?

Ideology is the driving force of politics, economics, and conflict in this setting, and we strive to tell stories that will speak to where we have been, where we are, and where we may be going as a global, human community.

The Story
Soon after the new millennium begins, humankind’s oldest enemies—war, famine, and disease—are winning the battle on planet Earth. The United Nations decides to attempt the mission that has been the dream of countless science fiction writer sand fans for generations: the colonization of a new world, before it is too late. The establishment of a new outpost for mankind as an alternative to the decaying situation on our mother planet seems to be the last and best hope for the continued existence of our species.

Codenamed “Unity,” the plan is simple: send an expedition to the nearest Earth-like planet, Chiron, in the Alpha Centauri system. Furnish the people, equipment, and supplies necessary to build a new and prosperous society. Ensure that the mission stays on-track by carefully monitoring its progress from Earth. Then, when the time is right, and if the need still exists, begin shuttling others to this New World.

But space travel is a difficult undertaking. It is hard to reach our own moon. Nuclear pulse propulsion can achieve only a fraction of the speed of light, meaning the journey to Chiron will be decades long. During that time, the colonists will be placed in suspended animation—cold sleep—to arrest the natural aging process and reduce the logistical complexities of travel. (It is not yet feasible to supply enough food, water, and other necessities to produce a viable generation ship.)

As Unity reaches the Alpha Centauri system, it is beset by multiple crises: a micrometeorite collision leading to the catastrophic, cascading failure of multiple ship's systems, compounded by a general mutiny that culminates in the assassination of the expedition's leader, Captain Jonathan Garland, and its ultimate dissolution.

Factions
The human factions of Planet are not divided by race, language, or place of ancestral origin. Rather, the survivors organize themselves according to ideological preferences. Each faction is guided by the vision of its leader. These visions, in turn, give each faction a unique set of advantages and disadvantages. By comparing the strengths of your faction to the parameters of a customized planet, you can either give yourself an edge against the other factions or set yourself a unique challenge to overcome.

You are likely to find the game more enjoyable if you pick a faction you can empathize with (even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything they profess).

University of Planet (led by Academician Prokhor Zakharov)
The University is completely dedicated to research and the creation of technologies to solve the problems of mankind. They are rumored to sometimes put the pursuit of knowledge ahead of ethics. They start the game with the Unity Computing technology and one bonus technology of their choice (a nod to data tapes they have salvaged) and must pursue the Discover research path. As befits their interest in tools, the University’s affinity is for Supremacy. Each University base receives a free Network Node at founding. The University’s research progresses quickly, but their open-access philosophy makes them susceptible to attacks by covert “Probe Teams,” and their natural curiosity causes them to question the authorities that provide security and defense, undermining internal stability and power projection. The University cannot make Romantic or Enlightened social choices. The University builds a new Robot for every 6 citizens. Three of the University’s five starting populations are Robots, placing an early cap on their economy. A Librarian helps add to their already-impressive edge in technological research.

Gaian Stepdaughters (led by Lady Deirdre Skye)
The Gaians are determined not to repeat the environmental mistakes of Old Earth. They seek to limit the impact of human settlement on Planet. They start out with the Centauri Ecology technology and advanced abilities to interact with native life, including the ability to move freely through xenofungus squares and gather extra nutrients from the fungus. Their empathy with Planet gives them the ability to place ravaging mindworms directly under their control. Their experience with life systems makes their bases more efficient and confers significant bonuses to food production but their pacifist leanings undermine the abilities of their military units and they resent police control in times of crisis. Because of negative environmental consequences, Gaians cannot choose the Free Market economic modality. Gaians may prioritize either the Explore or Choose research paths. The Gaian affinity is for Harmony, following from their desire to live “in dialogue” (symbiosis) with Planet. The Gaians begin the game with Emergency Supplies representing Unity’s seed bank. Their starting population includes both a Technician and an Artist, allowing them to get head starts on culture and production.

Human Labyrinth (led by Chairman Sheng-ji Yang)
This faction is ruled under harsh collectivist/authoritarian principles. The good of the individual is totally subordinate to the interests of the state as defined by its ruler. The Labyrinth seeks to radically redefine what it means to be human, trampling preconceived notions about right and wrong. These so-called “Hivemen” are isolationist and militaristic. The Labyrinth begins with the Doctrine: Loyalty technology and may choose two bonus doctrines at game start. Their bases are built underground for security, and befitting their hermitically closed society, each base receives a free Resocialization Chamber facility to convert citizens to drones. The Labyrinth’s population growth, social engineering multipliers, and production output are all above average, but their economy is weakened by isolation and they suffer from inefficiency caused by repression. There is a 50% chance that new populations will be Drones. The Labyrinth cannot make Democratic social choices. The Hive’s starting population is divided between simple laborers and the ruling castes, consisting of one Overseer, one Talent, and a Thinker. The faction’s Colony Pod and ‘Former both use the drill rig chassis and can burrow beneath Planet’s surface. The Labyrinth’s Affinity is for Supremacy and it may pursue either Expand or Command research priorities, in line with the Chairman’s philosophy. The Labyrinth cannot make social choices except on the Frontier and Classical spectrums.

Morgan Industries (led by CEO Nwabudike Morgan)
The Morganites are organized along corporate lines and dedicated (at least in theory) to laissez-faire capitalist economic principles. Everyone and everything are presumed to be in competition for material wealth and comfort. The Morganites start the game with 100 energy credits and the Industrial Base technology. This faction prioritizes the Build research lane. Reflecting their entrepreneurial endeavors, Morganites receive a percentage of bonus income based on the total amount of commerce between factions and generate additional energy and trade goods. Because citizens have expensive tastes, it is difficult for them to support units in the field and they must build Hab Complex facilities before the population of any of their bases can exceed four citizens. The Morganites have limited options on the Economics spectrum. Despite starting the game with a unit of mercenary soldiers that is generally superior to basic militia, Morganite citizens lack the interest to sacrifice for their convictions, reducing the quality of their armies. The Morganites begin with the game with a mixed bag of two Citizens, one Drone, and one Overseer to join their Talent. Morganites are Supremacists who see no reason not to modify self or Planet. Morganites may not choose the Equity value. The second of the Morganites’ unique starting units is a crawler, which can be used for trade or resource-ferrying missions.

Spartan Federation (led by Colonel Corazón Santiago)
Spartans are paramilitary survivalists. They believe that people have both a right and a duty to bear arms—and to use them when tyranny threatens. The Spartans begin the game locked in a Vendetta with all other factions for 40 turns. It is in a permanent Vendetta with the Tribe. The Spartans start the game with the Doctrine: Initiative technology and a powerful Impact Squad. As befits their focus on preparations for war, they do not pay the added cost for developing new unit prototypes. Spartan research follows the Conquer tree. The morale of Spartan units is exceptionally high and their seasoned officer cadre imparts a substantial combat bonus, but their extravagant military spending weighs down economic operations. The availability of three War Stores can help the Spartans turn out a large army in the early game. Because of the presence of certain malcontents in Spartan society—those who take the call for armed vigilance to a bullying extreme--overall faction cohesion is poor. The Spartans may not make the “Wealth” social choice. The Spartan population is small, but an Officer adds to their punch. Spartans are Purists who romanticize the past.

The Lord’s Conclave (led by Sister Miriam Godwinson)
The believers of the Conclave devote themselves to pursuit of higher truth and seek to persuade other societies of the correctness of their beliefs. They start the game with the Social Psych technology and follow the Choose research path. Believers are resistant to probe brainwashing but their suspicion of the mind-machine interface and reduced attention to secular affairs retards their research efforts, while their belief that Planet is their Promised Land sometimes interferes with their ecological sensibilities. The Believers cannot adopt Eudaimonia as a social choice. Believers are Purists when it comes to affinity. Also, this faction will not make Cyborgs or Specials. The Labyrinth grows at a fearsome rate and is already the largest faction by population size at game start. An Artist and a Thinker provide opportunities to focus on cultural expansion or doctrinal advances. Believers pursue research on the Choose tree. The Believers also begin the game with a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital once used to treat the sick and dying aboard Unity, later repurposed as a ranging vehicle to survey their new inheritance.

The Peacekeeping Forces (led by Commissioner Pravin Lal)
The Peacekeepers continue to advance the humanitarian principles embodied in the Unity Mission Charter and are officially committed to the reunification of the factions under their own democratic leadership. They start the game with the Information Networks technology, reflecting their commitment to the free and vigorous exchange of ideas. The idealism of this faction attracts an intellectual elite, but their society tends toward bureaucratic inefficiency. Peacekeepers have an aversion to the Classical social choices. They follow the Build and Choose research trees and hold the affinity of Purity. Peacekeeper bases can exceed normal population limits by 2. Due to their experience with parliamentary maneuvering, Peacekeeper votes count as double when the Planetary Council convenes for an election. Peacekeeper societies have little slack: they begin with the game with an Administrator, Artist, Librarian, and Talent, allowing the player to make early headway on Secret Projects. The Peacekeepers begin the game with a squad of Power Armor, reflecting their association with what remains of the elite United Nations Marine Corps.

The Human Tribe (led by Selectman Pete Landers)
The Human Tribe is a network of communities (some would say, a cult) founded in the United States during the last civil war. Members believe that the ideal society resembles a neighborhood: small, intimate, and determinedly parochial. Tribal forces stowed away aboard Unity and helped contribute to the ship’s destruction. They begin with the game with Doctrine: Defense. The Tribe’s veteran soldiers are highly effective, especially when on defense, and its suspicious society is hard to infiltrate or subvert. Each base also receives a free Bunker facility. However, the faction suffers significant penalties to production and research because of its emphasis on informal relationships and suspicion of centralized government. Tribals are Purists, hearkening back to an imagined ideal of social amity and civic engagement. This faction must make social choices from the Frontier or Romantic spectrums. Tribals may explore the Build and Conquer research trees. The Tribe is the smallest faction at game start. Reflecting their status as violent stowaways that participated in the fighting that led to Unity’s destruction, the Tribe begins the game locked in Vendetta with all other factions for 20 turns. It is in a permanent Vendetta with the Spartans.

The New Two Thousand (led by Governor Oscar van de Graaf)
The New Two Thousand are investors in a joint-stock company that helped to finance the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri. They agreed to be compensated with land after a brief period of service to the “main” mission. Faction members hope to carve out their own slices of paradise with as little interference from others as can be managed. Their affinity of Supremacy matches a belief that Chiron should be the oyster of anyone with enough courage to place it under the plow or the lash. The New Two Thousand begin the game with the Doctrine: Expansion and may pursue the Build and Expand research pathways. The faction’s values lend themselves to higher efficiency and industrial output but reduced morale and cohesion due to the enforcement of contracts that are not always favorable for their signatories. The faction starts with one War Stores and two ‘Formers that represent assets of the American Reclamation Corporation, a federal corporation once run by the governor himself. The New Two Thousand begin the game with two Talents and two Technicians, a reflection of the Governor’s success at recruiting “the best of the best.” This faction is Supremacist; it may not make the Planned or Post-Scarcity social choices.

Sources:
Chris McCubbin, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts, 1999), pp. 11-13.

this faction puts me in mind of Canudos, which wanted to live peacefully on its own in the Brazilian forest separate from a new regime dedicated to beef and rubber export: naturally, almost no survivors were left

doubtless they'll have units named for Dorothy Stang and Berta Cáceres capture-recruiting Morganite debt peons

MisterP said:

this faction puts me in mind of Canudos, which wanted to live peacefully on its own in the Brazilian forest separate from a new regime dedicated to beef and rubber export: naturally, almost no survivors were left

Starting with Centauri Meditation is one heck of an equalizer, at least. I went for big and bombastic with the entire New Amnesty vendetta arc, but one could imagine that being the first faction to tame mindworms (and spore launchers) could really throw the others into a loop.

uggggh, thought of a more specific scenario for the Gaians--that they just happen to be moving too fast for captives to keep up in mindworm country every time; that sorta goes with the whole "hypocritical hippie" aspect

and if Zak put EVERYONE accused by another faction on trial (on frame-up or ridiculous charges, no doubt) the University of Planet would be empty!

Last weekend, inspired by the YouTube channel Useful Charts, I began tracing the relationships between the different RtD characters, with a focus on the major faction leaders. My hope was that the exercise would generate something meaningful to say about each one. While the chart itself is in no condition yet for sharing, some useful insights begin to emerge.

Plotting the relationships between faction leaders is a goal that extends back as far as 2014 when players in a forum-based megagame set in the RtD universe began asking for backstory to help them decide how their respective factions would likely interact after Planetfall.

I put Captain Jonathan Garland, now deceased, at the top of the chart. Later, I realized that some of the political and philosophical leaders like Apsara Mongkut and Jean-Baptiste Keller could be moved into a kind of plot firmament, above even the sainted Garland.

Garland's Executive Officer was Portuguese General Francisco d'Almeida, also lost during the Unity Crisis. All the senior officers reported up to Garland through d'Almeida, who was no fan of his new master.

Unity's Third Officer was future academician Prokhor Zakharov, then a Senior Commander and Chief Science Officer. Zakharov's command encompassed several subordinate divisions. These included: the Atomic Energy Laboratory overseen by Mission Area Director Johann Anhaldt, a Swiss mathematician that had sometimes operated as Zakharov's foil in academic discussions about the role of science in public policy during the 2060s; the Data Services Division, overseen by Lieutenant Commander Tạ Dọc Thân. Once Planetside, Zakharov's governance would quickly alienate two other notable characters: Australian-trained Kä naval commander Master Malakai Ro, who had cut her teeth hunting pirates in the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone, and Genetic Sciences Division director Tamineh Pahlavi, an Iranian biomedical researcher previously employed by the American Reclamation Corporation. Zakharov's only other noteworthy relationship was with Lieutenant Commander Deirdre Skye, Scottish Director of the mission's Life Sciences Division, whose appointment he had opposed on grounds that her work was "amateurish" and "emotional." Zakharov preferred Pahlavi, whom he had never met, but with whose policy advocacy he sympathized, being himself an outspoken technological instrumentalist.

Zakharov was an inconsistent manager, leaving the flashy Than to conduct his own affairs while intervening often in Anhaldt's optimizing of the ship's reactors, a topic on which he was eminently qualified to make himself a royal nuisance.

Other direct reports to d'Almeida included French Contre-amiral Raoul André St. Germaine, Chief of the Aquatic Operations Section; [French-]Canadian loyalist General Marcel Salan of the United Nations Marine Corps; and Chief of the Air Operations Section, the West German commander, Kleisel Mercator.

D'Almeida's other "directs" included Chief Medical Officer Commander Pravin Lal and the expedition's Master-at-Arms and head of security, Commander Rachael Winzenreid, another product of Switzerland. Winzenreid pleased no one. Her background in civilian law enforcement (she was a former Commandant of the Swiss Federal Office of Police) elicited no confidence from military man d'Almeida, while a pronounced pessimism alienated her from Garland, well-known for his diplomatic approach to conflict resolution.

Winzenreid had supervisory authority over a number of important operations, including those of Indian Brigadier Sardul Singh's Corrections Services unit and Head Game Warden Jeremy Tanner Marsh's Forward Contact Team. Winzenreid was also the responsible officer for political affairs: Sub-commander Sheng-ji Yang and other political officers foisted on the mission by authoritarian regimes answered to Brigadier Singh. Somewhere deep down in Winzenreid's organization chart lurked a Sergeant, Corazón Santiago, respected for her calm professionalism.

Lal had his own supervisory pyramid. Pahlavi, Skye, the mission's Director of Psych Services Sister Miriam Godwinson, and Dr. Aleigha Cohen, Anglo-Burmese Chief of Neurosurgery. Both were warrant officers. Lal had a positive working relationship with all four, dealing primarily with Godwinson, Pahlavi, and Cohen as related to the problems of patient management during cold sleep. His interaction with Skye was more limited due to her involvement in matters outside his field of expertise.

Santiago knew none of the other leaders, but she did have first-hand experience fighting both against and alongside the private military contractors of the American Reclamation Corporation, once led by Proprieter Oscar van de Graaf. Van de Graaf incidentally blamed the world's richest man, CEO Nwabudike Morgan, for many of his misfortunes prior to entering government. Morgan had also had working knowledge of Marsh's past: both had run guns for the Biafran cause around the same time.

Van de Graaf had also previously employed Pahlavi and, on occasion, provided armed escort for Godwinson's embassies to secessionist leadership. Van de Graaf was mortally opposed to another stowaway, Pete Landers.

More to come. I started with my own creations, mostly, because of familiarity, but I'll eventually map the full range of characters associated with RtD.

I like the conceit of "all the different leaders agree on the same problem, and then come up with 7-9 different interpretations and solutions"

intriguingly we also have seen some glimpses into Centaurian meme culture: "gettoff my land, ya Peacekeepin' sonofa--," the Network Node march, and Why Lady Dierdre Can't Blink

ah, the atomic blimp, it solves the mess of the 50s' atomic planes, has infinite dwell time, can release off-the-shelf quadcopters or simple patch-bots, and they can get FAST

MisterP said:

ah, the atomic blimp, it solves the mess of the 50s' atomic planes, has infinite dwell time, can release off-the-shelf quadcopters or simple patch-bots, and they can get FAST

The best part of atomic blimp is the explosions.

Desert Journeyman said:

[New Two Thousand Post]

Ah yes, the murica faction. For some reason I imagine their vehicles all being giant hummer type cars.

Twiggierjet said:

Actually, I realized just now what this faction reminds me of. You know how a while back on one of the other SMAC threads I had the idea of hybrid factions that would occur when two different leaders end up being forced to share an escape vessel? This is pretty much what I imagined a hybrid between the Spartans and the Morganites would look like.

Makes sense.

At various times, I've either flirted with, or said directly that the New 2000 are a Morganite offshoot. But I'm not big on offshoot factions generally, and I ended up writing personal histories for both men that put them on opposite sides of the Second American Civil War, making it hard to imagine placing van de Graaf under Morgan, even if only temporarily.

In a setting with just seven factions, Morgan is the obvious standard-bearer for owner-operator capitalism. With a larger number of factions that cause us to divide the ideological spectrum into a larger number of pieces (barring the invention of new ideologies not yet guessed at), there's an opportunity to distinguish between what I could call "banker" or "railroad" capitalism and "cattle baron" capitalism.

Morgan's cocky demeanor, flavor quotes, and semi-canon psych profile don't really suggest to me that he's a disinterested theorist. He wants to start on an open playing field so that he's not denied access to the game, but he has every intention of closing it himself once he makes it to the top.

Van de Graaf probably thinks along much the same lines when it comes to economics, but he's got a massive moralizing streak whereas Morgan does not. I think Van de Graaf has certain convictions about government, especially law and order. For Morgan, government of people is just a task. For van de Graaf, it's a kind of an unconscious opportunity to right all the wrongs he feels were done to him. Morgan spends his days flitting between the board room and the media green room. Van de Graaf is probably most at home presiding over kangaroo courts convened in the Town Hall.

I hadn't thought about it until just now--although opportunities to articulate myself like this are exactly the reason I've been posting these faction profiles, so I thank you profusely for wading in with comments--but probably the way to draw a sharper distinction between the Morganites and the Pilgrims is actually to split van de Graaf into two characters, one of which is the mogul who led the mighty ARC, the other a kind of failed mayor, emphasizing his opinions on civil society more than his background as an industrialist concerned with profit, loss, and exploitation of labor. I don't know that I can bring myself to do it, but we'll see.

Desert Journeyman said:

In a setting with just seven factions, Morgan is the obvious standard-bearer for owner-operator capitalism. With a larger number of factions that cause us to divide the ideological spectrum into a larger number of pieces (barring the invention of new ideologies not yet guessed at), there's an opportunity to distinguish between what I could call "banker" or "railroad" capitalism and "cattle baron" capitalism.

Makes sense. I always thought that it would have been interesting if Alpha Centauri had late-game content that involved newer generations interpreting the faction's ideology in different ways, maybe unlocking special projects depending on which interpretation becomes the dominant one, and this kind of ideological divide is one I can see arising in the Morganites.

Desert Journeyman said:

Morgan spends his days flitting between the board room and the media green room. Van de Graaf is probably most at home presiding over kangaroo courts convened in the Town Hall.

The vibe I get is that when Morgan makes a media appearance to aggrandize himself, he's dressed in a sophisticated business suit, discussing something in a classy boardroom on top of a skyscraper, whereas Van de Graaf starts such media appearances with himself dressed in denim fixing a truck or staring out onto the horizon while whatever the new planet's version of an oil derrick is works behind him.

Desert Journeyman said:

but probably the way to draw a sharper distinction between the Morganites and the Pilgrims is actually to split van de Graaf into two characters, one of which is the mogul who led the mighty ARC, the other a kind of failed mayor, emphasizing his opinions on civil society more than his background as an industrialist concerned with profit, loss, and exploitation of labor. I don't know that I can bring myself to do it, but we'll see.

I feel like he works quite well as one character. It's not uncommon for businessmen to also have all sorts of political ideas after all.

Twiggierjet said:

Makes sense. I always thought that it would have been interesting if Alpha Centauri had late-game content that involved newer generations interpreting the faction's ideology in different ways, maybe unlocking special projects depending on which interpretation becomes the dominant one, and this kind of ideological divide is one I can see arising in the Morganites.

That's a great point.

I think the "Choose" tree of doctrinal developments I came up with would help take factions in that direction, if implemented. The doctrines deal variously with combat (e.g., Preemption), social control (e.g., Sousveillance), and interactions with the planetary biome (e.g., Water Discipline).

Twiggierjet said:

The vibe I get is that when Morgan makes a media appearance to aggrandize himself, he's dressed in a sophisticated business suit, discussing something in a classy boardroom on top of a skyscraper, whereas Van de Graaf starts such media appearances with himself dressed in denim fixing a truck or staring out onto the horizon while whatever the new planet's version of an oil derrick is works behind him.

I think Van de Graaf never appears without a rifle in hand. But then, I'm not sure the New 2000 ever develop the same media ecosystem that the Morganites establish almost reflexively and at once. The New 2000 live, almost like the Hunters or the Tribes, in quasi-autonomous homesteads. It's just that Van de Graaf or people like him own the general store... and the grist mill... and the blacksmith... and the marshal.

Twiggierjet said:

I feel like he works quite well as one character. It's not uncommon for businessmen to also have all sorts of political ideas after all.

Thank you!

"that varied depending on the perspective of the beholder" is such a Zakharov turn of phrase I read it in his voice

Twiggierjet said:

Would you mind explaining the research branches you have? I saw the base 4 like discover and build in your doc, and a few others, but I'm not entirely sure I have the full picture.

I'd be glad to. Thank you for asking.

Research is divided into two tracks: Technologies, which are discoveries that correspond mostly to material improvements or insights about the physical world, and Doctrine, which are revolutions in thought that influence human behavior, including how technologies are used. Separately, Affinities are an analytical shorthand for understanding the way in which a faction's ideology both drives and constrains its cultural and scientific development.

Each technology and doctrine in Racing the Darkness can be grouped into one of nine tracks.

The Build track corresponds to advances in science and engineering. It is mostly useful for altering the physical world to meet the needs of the colonist.

The Discover path deals with the Newtonian physical and Terran life sciences, including descriptive neurology and psychology.

The Connect path deals with information science: computers, the data they process, and artificial intelligence.

The Explore track is about engaging with the Chironian physical and life sciences. This path helps factions to take better advantage of the resources of Planet.

The Conquer set of technologies and doctrines focuses on research with direct military applications.

The Expand track is all about discoveries and thinking that facilitates population growth and mobility.

The Command track is organized around research with implications for social control.

The Choose track deals with the ethical challenges of tomorrow, such as how to use different technology and doctrine.

The Unity path is a limited branch dealing with technologies carried to Planet by the colonists themselves.

Twiggierjet said:

How does this differ from other ones? A lot of the technology on the unity could be grouped into tracks like Build or Discover no? Also, what track would cover stuff like human genetic engineering?

As for Affinities, will you be using the ones from Beyond Earth or your own system?

It could be argued that the Unity track technologies aren't sufficiently unique to justify their own path. From a flavor perspective, it identifies technologies that would be salvaged and then, at best, reverse-engineered, not technically discovered. Examples of Unity technologies include Unity Salvage Operations (meaning the distinct set of techniques required to conduct recovery in the Chironian environment) and Atmospheric Water Generation. It also includes Fission and Atomic Engineering, which is the use of peaceful nuclear explosives for terraformation and other forms of economic development.

Genetic engineering falls under the Discover path.

I use the same names and rough alignments as the affinities in Beyond Earth but define them more completely and then don't include hybrids, which I think muddle things and make it more difficult to achieve distinctiveness.

Here are my affinities:

Purity. Humanity will forever be defined by our experience in the cradle of "Old" Earth. If Chiron is to be the last refuge of our species, then we should fill it with things that are familiar, both the physical and metaphysical. Planet should be remade in Earth's image--because that is the environment to which we are suited. Purists look forward to eliminating the "pestilential" xenofungus and replacing the local ecology. (Shapers specifically call this process "rebuilding.") At larger scales, Purist factions hope to stimulate the planetary greenhouse effect through a massive infusion of atmospheric hydrocarbons. Purist societies suffer less from the social dislocation of pollution and terraformation, which is an accepted cost of their grand project. Society should be organized around the values and beliefs that we practiced historically on Earth--because they are time-tested. According to Purist thinking, humans can reach their maximum potential only if they preserve the traditions, artifacts, and, yes, the biological distinctiveness, inherited from their ancestors. Purists are leery of robotics: computers aren't an adequate replacement for people and over-dependence on thinking machines will diminish humanity's incentives to "do for itself." Worse, an AI creation may also evolve beyond our control, meaning that humanity could enslave itself to a flawed alien demigod entirely of its own making. In the cultural domain, Purists prefer doctrine and ideology that presume a fixed and corruptible human nature, in need of close and constant tending, and place the greatest number of restrictions on the use of robotics, and especially AI. Purists believe that the ethical and religious systems of the past contain valuable insights about the tolerances and management of human systems. Even if not devout, Purist factions accept that certain "traditional" features of human society, especially hierarchy, are evolutionary adaptations no less useful than the opposable thumb, and should be studied--if not embraced and applied wholesale--to solve contemporary problems. In a Purist retelling, the people of Old Earth destroyed itself by embracing the paths that were easy--fear and decadence--in lieu of taking other paths that emphasized community and self-abnegation, even if the Purist definition of community itself can be quite restrictive. Purists seek growth through experience and cooperation. They value predictability and are wary of that which is unknown. Purist factions include the Lord's Conclave (Godwinson), the Human Tribe (Landers), the Shapers of Chiron (Nagao), and the Human Ascendancy (Pahlavi).

Supremacy. Both Man and Planet alike bear changing in the honorable search for objective perfection. The simple goal of our species is to perpetuate itself—by any means necessary. Stronger is better. Faster is better. In this race against a pitiless universe, and indeed a hostile planet, we would hamstring ourselves to overlook, much less disdain, any advantage. Supremacists embrace the possibility of social and ecological experimentation, which will serve as the forcing function to produce new insights about how now we must live. Supremacists seek out what is practical and efficacious. They are neither above the introduction of invasive species nor below giving way to Planet when adaptation would be less work than resistance. Humanity, too, is what Supremacists make of it. Our bodies are living machines and machines are simply tools. Modification of the body, and even invention of a thinking machine, can do nothing to invert the relationship between master and servant. Given this outlook, change is appealing to Supremacists. Since change is one yardstick of success, the familiar is contemptible to them. "Humanity" is a concept that can be redefined at whim. Supremacists tend to believe that Old Earth destroyed itself through some combination of timidity, suprestitition, and hubris. In other words, we had the tools to solve our problems, including AI, and then declined to use them for silly ethical reasons. Supremacist factions include the Human Labyrinth (Yang), the Centauri Monopoly (Morgan), the University of Planet (Zakharov), the Spartan Federation (Santiago), the Dreamers of Chiron (Cobb/Cohen), the Tomorrow Initiative (Metrion), the Children of the Atom (Anhaldt), and the New Two Thousand (Van de Graaf).

Harmony. Humanity, the intruder, must alert its rhythms to suit those of Chiron, or else perish in its obstinacy. The wisest understand that one does not merely make a home so much as one is made by it. The trappings of Old Earth are useful only inasmuch as they can be relied upon to temporarily bridge the gap between mere survival and full-fledged integration into both the new Chironian biosphere and indeed the new rhythms of the life and society the colonists are building for themselves. Harmony, which takes its cues from living systems that are classically vulnerable to tampering and thrive within carefully-controlled parameters of diet and temperature, says little about the utility of artificial intelligence, but persons inclined to Harmony usually wish to experience Planet directly and prize the role of intuition and emotion in guiding human affairs. Like Purists, Harmonists think machines make poor replacements for living organisms. Factions that promote Harmony usually practice lifestyles that require them to avoid inflicting traumas on the natural environment. They are also, on the whole, fairly sympathetic to nonconformists. (Even the New State merely declines to reward non-conformity among their non-military populace rather than punish it.) For a Harmonist, the defining feature of a system is that it is meaningful to the user rather than that it is predictable, or even successful. Folkways are inherently legitimate as an expression of self, which can be as important as allegiance to an illusory "public-interest" objectivity. Harmonious factions include Gaia's Stepdaughters (Skye), the Peacekeeping Forces (Lal), the New State (St. Germaine), and the Hunters of Chiron (Marsh).

Provisionally, yes. The Children of the Atom are now the Digital Oracle. (I pulled the definitions from notes preceding the renaming.)

The Tomorrow Initiative is now the Legacy Initiative. I believe I used the "Tomorrow Institute" as an organization operating on Old Earth in the mid-to-late twenty-first century to help identify potential Unity crew/colonists.

Cross-posting from OTL thread:

So, having re-posted my Memory of Earth character profiles, it's given me a chance to reflect on this RtD addition to SMAC, as well as how I contribute to this project. As I said, this arc sort of set the pattern for my segments- now that I've added a Far Cry 2 merc, the only thing it's really missing is one of the factions from the SMAC Fac Pack or Pickly's 5 Custom Factions lol (though those are already earmarked for other places). It was where I first really used the visual element of this project to really evoke characters and moods from other series, and outside of the genre. In many way, I consider RtD to be an elaborate exercise in fancasting- but not only of actors, but organizations, concepts.

Helping to fill out the Observers' internal society via the theories was fun. The Defenders, Unifiers, and Wanters all directly uphold a separate aspect of the mission statement. (I probably should have had a less conspiratorial version of the Wanters, but I suspect most of the more sober-minded xenobiologists and other people searching for intelligent life would just fit into the other theories anyway, or more likely be dutiful non-ideological theoryless.) Breaking down each segment of the Observer ideology in order to create subcultures was neat, even though I haven’t done the same for any of the other RtD factions. Though I also did that SMAC Fac Pack import Chiron Cartel.

What do I actually think of the Memory of Earth now? In short, they give a very strong Alien Crossfire-esque expansion vibe to be. Very SMAX feel. Their obsession with alien intelligence is very niche and rather oddball in the same way the Data Angels are a completely hacker culture. Seems like a small interest/identity to build an entire society around, an entire political faction. (The Nautilus Pirates, piratical dressing aside, are plainly a bandit-barbarian faction, which makes sense to me.) But the UFO focus does fit the 1990s vibe of the original game, and brings along a lot of neat imagery to evoke. (I didn't really mention Grays so much and the only slight reference to XCOM/X-COM was in my Lexicon segment, but they could probably be featured more in the Observer lore. Also I threw in a slight in-joke to Delta Green.) As far as how viable would the Observers be? Hell if I know! But I think adding the theories gives them greater depth and texture, indicating what internal conflicts might exist within.

The Memory and Mercator also fit in RtD's specific setting very well, and so I envisioned the faction would be composed of mainly former intelligence agents and military officers, not to mention the more oddball rocket scientists and the like. I can't really imagine them existing in canon SMAC since the political motivation isn't exactly there- after all, that's a world that's hinted to be completely fallen apart, way past a century-long Cold War. Well, I guess you can imagine alt-Mercator still thinking that the reason why humanity failed is because that it didn't have an external enemy to focus its efforts against. But in that situation, something like climate collapse or nuclear war might be more resonant. RtD as it is feels like the superpowers are still able to maneuver and machinate and build - there's space colonies in the Solar System, a vault system lifted straight from Fallout (ugh), and the whole new continent pulled forth from the Indian Ocean (uh huh). <As a side note- the Shamash thing really could use some references to real-world Atlantean lost continents located in that region- Kumari Kandam and Lemuria come to mind.)

Time for another editor's corner!

The material cribbed from and inspired by NBC's 2009 television series Kings is an awkward fit for Racing the Darkness. For its part, Kings was a modern retelling of the story of King David, and Silas Benjamin played the role of Saul.

Silas Benjamin doesn't make it to Chiron, and the long-simmering conflict between the fictional nations of Shiloh and Gath, which I had rooted in petty nationalism, clashes with the intent of the setting, which explicitly rejects national identity as an interesting source of conflict between the Unity survivors.

One place the story of Silas Benjamin did work was in fan fiction. Benjamin's long-time nemesis, Gathi ruler Vesper Abaddon, was a neat foil for the pacifistic, rule-oriented Commissioner Pravin Lal. Abaddon stood accused of many atrocities, and the question of his relationship to the Peacekeeper colony was a Rorschach Test for those who hoped to develop a body of planetary law. Abaddon hewed to what I described as Luttwakian Ethics, waging war brutally to hasten its conclusion and settle matters that he felt could not be addressed in other ways. I added Luttwakian Ethics to the technology tree as a doctrine in the Choose branch.

More recently, I've rewritten my treatments of both Benjamin and Abaddon to focus on ideological questions. Silas Benjamin became one of the most important practitioners of Neo-Monarchism on Old Earth, and his story was the vehicle for articulating principles about how modern kingship might be practiced.

In the next post, I'll present the rewritten biography of King Silas Benjamin, with commentary to explain what's changed, how, and why. You can find an earlier treatment here.

hey, if they're from Mars they should have some experience propitiating machines whose functioning they could never understand ...

Great post, @Strategos' Risk!

A few questions/observations.

What drives the popularity of the XM8 over other surplus weapons? Pure familiarity, or the diversity of smart ammunition choices? (As I recall, that was its primary appeal.)

I could see the Pilgrims becoming fond fans of the IMF's knock-around games. Hard spot for a hard people.

Cheating Spartans! Santiago would roll over in her pod. Still, I think it tracks with the Holnist crowd's values.

Desert Journeyman said:

What drives the popularity of the XM8 over other surplus weapons? Pure familiarity, or the diversity of smart ammunition choices? (As I recall, that was its primary appeal.)

I wouldn't say that the M8 is necessarily the most common Unity surplus weapon, I think it's just one of the popular ones that many of the personnel from the third world and so on were familiar with. I think its abundance led to later weapontechs finding ways to extend its usage, which include devising smart ammunition for it beyond the "7.62mm UN standard."

Desert Journeyman said:

I could see the Pilgrims becoming fond fans of the IMF's knock-around games. Hard spot for a hard people.

Yeah, I was thinking of how to incorporate them into the segment.

Desert Journeyman said:

Cheating Spartans! Santiago would roll over in her pod. Still, I think it tracks with the Holnist crowd's values.

I figure that for all of their posturing, the Spartans care more about victory than they do about honor. Their fixation on survival seems to permit all sorts of unsportsmanlike behavior. Even in the original "Journey to Centauri" novella their conduct was fairly disreputable.

Emporium mercs, on the other hand, are generally in it for the love of the game, and to make some credits. So they measure success with other metrics.

If I remember correctly, the XM8 was designed to be used with various fused shells. It was going to be the first widely-deployed "smart" individual weapons system.

To me, the Spartans, like the Believers, eventually spawn two distinct cultures: Santiago's Starship Trooper-y version and the degenerate Holnist take on Prepperism.

Desert Journeyman said:

If I remember correctly, the XM8 was designed to be used with various fused shells. It was going to be the first widely-deployed "smart" individual weapons system.

Are you sure you're thinking of the right weapon, because the XM8 was a modular assault rifle, the weapon you are probably thinking about is the XM29 which was apart of the OICW program.

You're correct, @Jedi Commisar. My mistake.

Early and late smart weapons are two of the Weapons types in Racing the Darkness so I was thinking in that direction. Visually, the two rifles/platforms are also similar.

I was just riffing off the SNL Digital Short but dang looks like my Space Olympics concept was preceded by fans on the original official SMAC forums:

korn469 said:

The Centauri Games. Every 20 years a Centauri version of the Olympics could be held (starts with the first council). The council would meet and decide who hosts them. The same faction could not host them back to back. Simple Population vote whoever has the most wins (can't vote for faction that held them last). For 3 turns the city holding them would be in an automatic golden age and commerce would also double in that city and be increased by 50% for all cities of the factions participating in the Games. The last turn of the golden age would be when the games actually took place. Attacking the city holding the games during the 3 turns it was in a golden age would be an atrocity and you could only attack if you were boycotting the games. The computer would randomly select which faction won the most gold medals and that faction would receive +2 talents in everyone of its cities for 2 turns after the games in joyous celebration of their Olympic victory. Additionally when the vote for which faction will hold the Games takes place you could vote to boycott the Games. Finally the Centauri Games would be a monument item, whenever you first hold the games it would go on the monument beside all of your other achievements

please please please firaxis if you are reading this please make this possible

Resource Consumer said:

We should also remember that an integral part of getting the Centauri Games is bribing the Planetary Council.

We could even introduce specific sports.

Mindworm Wrestling anyone? Synchronised PBing? 6 a side Probing?

Aredhran said:

Longest Missile throw... NAH, take that back, Yang would win everytime

Feels like something that would happen in Crusader Kings. Maybe even in Old World.

Twiggierjet said:

Lmao did not expect to see a Community screenshot in one of these

I’m not sure how I decided to include paintball in this segment (I had previously mentioned that it’s called dye clash in this setting) but my notes for it were Spartans being way too into the sport (like “I play paintball three times a week, bro. I'm even one of those douchebags that brings in his own equipment.”), and the University experiencing their own version of the Greendale Paintball Assassin incident.

Given that the University explicitly has a drone problem, I can imagine their internal society being terribly stratified, imagine all of the worst issues with modern academia (tuitions aside… though maybe student loan debt is like their version of wage slavery). All of the working class from the University Enforcement security guards/military right down to the janitors have degrees, it’s still not enough to get ahead. Tenure? Forget about it unless you’re a real genius in theoretical physics. That sort of thing.